mkfs ("MaKe FileSystem") is the Linux/GNU command for formatting a disk partition with a specific filesystem.

Syntax



The basic syntax is:



mkfs -t type device



where type is the type of the filesystem and device is the Unix device the filesystem will reside on. Generally supported filesystems are Unix ext2 and ext3, MS-DOS, and Windows FAT32 (NTFS is typically not supported). Some Unices may support Sun and Mac OS filesystems.



At least on Linux, mkfs itself is only a wrapper for several filesystem-specific commands such as mkfs.ext3 or mkfs.vfat. These filesystem-specific commands can also be called directly.