On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 09:44, davis wrote: > On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 09:24:38AM -0400, Ryan Leathers wrote: > > Can someone explain to me the practical differences between mkfs and > > mke2fs? > > > > Hello Ryan, > > I believe they are the same thing for ext2/3. They are named differently > for ease of use. In the past, I have seen one be a link > to another. However, on my current debian unstable sparc box, > I have three exact copies (not links) of the same program. > > ie.: > > -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 30392 Apr 12 19:10 /sbin/mke2fs* > -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 30392 Apr 12 19:10 /sbin/mkfs.ext2* > -rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 30392 Apr 12 19:10 /sbin/mkfs.ext3*
Actually, now would be a good time to remember what we talked about last night about hard links. Note that there is a "3" next to "root" in the the long listing. This means that there are three (hard) links to the file. I would guess that these files really are the same (hard linked). The way to determine this for sure is to run "ls -li". Note that many programs that have linked versions (either hard or soft/symbolic), will behave differently based on how they're called. To get back to Ryan's original question, note that mkfs is usually a "wrapper" program that decides which sub-program to call based on the -t flag for filesystem type. So while there is no difference between mke2fs and mkfs.ext2 and mkfs.ext3, mkfs is a different program. mkfs can call the others like minix, cramfs, etc, if needed. The man page for mkfs should explain this. This help any Ryan? --Jeremy -- /---------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Jeremy Portzer [EMAIL PROTECTED] trilug.org/~jeremy | | GPG Fingerprint: 712D 77C7 AB2D 2130 989F E135 6F9F F7BC CC1A 7B92 | \---------------------------------------------------------------------/
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