mkfs not working in Red Hat 9 ?

hildog · 09-25-2003, 07:52 PM

I was trying to use the mkfs command (in Red Hat 9 - before I found the Floppy Formatter in KDE), and it said that that mkfs command was not found...I'm confused because this book, Red Hat 9 Bible, which was where I obtained my Red Hat 9 distribution, instructs me to use mkfs to make a specific file system...and it clearly doesn't work.

It's not a huge pressing issue for me now that I've found the floppy formatter in KDE, but I'm still curious.

Thanks.

trickykid · 09-25-2003, 08:44 PM

Is the command in your path?

find / -name mk2fs

or

locate mk2fs

hildog · 09-25-2003, 09:08 PM

When I do locate mkfs, I get the following:

$ locate mkfs
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.ext2.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.ext3.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.msdos.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.vfat.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkfs.jfs.8.gz
/sbin/mkfs.ext2
/sbin/mkfs.ext3
/sbin/mkfs.cramfs
/sbin/mkfs
/sbin/mkfs.msdos
/sbin/mkfs.vfat
/sbin/mkfs.jfs
/sbin/mkfs.reiserfs

Am I maybe just using the syntax incorrectly ?

trickykid · 09-25-2003, 09:11 PM

Are you logged in as root? You have to be root to run this command. If it doesn't work as root, then you don't have the /sbin in your $PATH. To run the command, you will have to specify the full path to it until you added /sbin to your $PATH

/sbin/mkfs

I guess they named it mkfs instead of mk2fs as well...

trickykid · 09-25-2003, 09:12 PM

Also it appears they've made a command for each type of filesystem as well.. notice you have mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3 and so on in your /sbin directory.. ?

michaelk · 09-25-2003, 09:22 PM

locate is a utility to find files on your system. You see that mkfs is located in the /sbin directory.

/sbin is usually not in a users path so that is why there was a command not found error.

./ means the current directory, ../ means one level up.

To see your path environment
echo $PATH

man is the online help pages
example:
man mkfs

michaelk · 09-25-2003, 09:24 PM

Were you thinking of mke2fs