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kumar
Asked: 2011-04-12 00:03:25 +0800 CST

fdisk - partition in single line

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Can you create a partition in a usb disk using fdisk command in a single line.

fdisk command is interactive in nature, But I want to automate partition creation in a single line using fdisk command.

linux command fdisk

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Trying to automate fdisk is possible, but it is not easy to maintain. As other answers note, either parted or sfdisk are designed to do what you want and are easier to automate.

    parted

    To create a partition in one line with parted:

    parted -a optimal /dev/usb mkpart primary 0% 4096MB

    as seen in this UNIX SE post. Each of the parts is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case here is how mkpart is defined:

    mkpart [part-type fs-type name] start end

    where things in square brackets are optional, but you probably want primary for your part-type, start at 0% and end at 4096MB or however large your USB stick is.

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  2. Erase everything, and create a single partition:

    dev='/dev/sdb'
sudo umount "$dev"
printf "o\nn\np\n1\n\n\nw\n" | sudo fdisk "$dev"
sudo mkfs.ext4 "${dev}1"

    See also: https://superuser.com/questions/332252/creating-and-formating-a-partition-using-a-bash-script

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  3. You probably need to use the parted command instead of fdisk.

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  4. sfdisk also has a non-interactive mode that reads in partition information from stdin. parted is more flexible, though.

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  5. Use sfdisk instead.

    The sfdisk man page is a little confusing, here's some specific examples of how to automate partition setup with sfdisk. One example is you can save the partition info from one drive via sfdisk -l and then dump that directly on to a new drive.

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  6. For GPT tables you can use sgdisk:

    sgdisk -n 0:0:0 /dev/sde

    -n, --new=partnum:start:end Create a new partition. You enter a partition number, starting sector, and an ending sector. Both start and end sectors can be specified in absolute terms as sector numbers or as positions measured in kibibytes (K), mebibytes (M), gibibytes (G), tebibytes (T), or pebibytes (P); for instance, 40M specifies a position 40MiB from the start of the disk. You can specify locations relative to the start or end of the specified default range by preceding the number by a '+' or '-' symbol, as in +2G to specify a point 2GiB after the default start sector, or -200M to specify a point 200MiB before the last available sector. A start or end value of 0 specifies the default value, which is the start of the largest available block for the start sector and the end of the same block for the end sector. A partnum value of 0 causes the program to use the first available partition number.

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