NAME

       mkfs - build a Linux filesystem

SYNOPSIS

       mkfs [options] [-t type] [fs-options] device [size]

DESCRIPTION

       This mkfs frontend is deprecated in favour of filesystem specific mkfs.<type> utils.

       mkfs is used to build a Linux filesystem on a device, usually a hard disk partition. The device argument
       is either the device name (e.g., /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2), or a regular file that shall contain the
       filesystem. The size argument is the number of blocks to be used for the filesystem.

       The exit status returned by mkfs is 0 on success and 1 on failure.

       In actuality, mkfs is simply a front-end for the various filesystem builders (mkfs.fstype) available
       under Linux. The filesystem-specific builder is searched for via your PATH environment setting only.
       Please see the filesystem-specific builder manual pages for further details.

OPTIONS

       -t, --type type
           Specify the type of filesystem to be built. If not specified, the default filesystem type (currently
           ext2) is used.

       fs-options
           Filesystem-specific options to be passed to the real filesystem builder.

       -V, --verbose
           Produce verbose output, including all filesystem-specific commands that are executed. Specifying this
           option more than once inhibits execution of any filesystem-specific commands. This is really only
           useful for testing.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Print version and exit. (Option -V will display version information only when it is the only
           parameter, otherwise it will work as --verbose.)

BUGS

       All generic options must precede and not be combined with filesystem-specific options. Some
       filesystem-specific programs do not automatically detect the device size and require the size parameter
       to be specified.

AUTHORS

       David Engel <david@ods.com>, Fred N. van Kempen <waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org>, Ron Sommeling
       <sommel@sci.kun.nl>.

       The manual page was shamelessly adapted from Remy Card’s version for the ext2 filesystem.

SEE ALSO

       fs(5), badblocks(8), fsck(8), mkdosfs(8), mke2fs(8), mkfs.bfs(8), mkfs.ext2(8), mkfs.ext3(8),
       mkfs.ext4(8), mkfs.minix(8), mkfs.msdos(8), mkfs.vfat(8), mkfs.xfs(8)

REPORTING BUGS

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY

       The mkfs command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.