Lab 18.2 Mounting Options no verbose output

FrankHeuer

Hello, I'm trying Lab 18.2 and use a disk that has three formatted partitions that for one of it I want to give a new format along this exercise. Step 2 says:"Note the locations of the superblocks, the number of block groups and any other pertinent information,
for each case." and looking further to the solution I found the -v switch as a solution. But my mkfs tool does not print any information. I run it on a virtual debian system on /dev/sdb

rank@debianVM:/tmp$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,PARTTYPE /dev/sdb
NAME FSTYPE PARTTYPE
sdb
├─sdb1 ext4 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
├─sdb2 vfat 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4
└─sdb3 ntfs 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4

coop

sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sdb1 etc
lots of output so probably do> ... | less

FrankHeuer

Dear coop, thanks a lot. I know the dumpe2fs command, but here I was wondering, why the -v switch does not be verbose. Is it a mistake in the exercise or does mkfs today behave different than in "older" times, times, when the exercise was written?

coop

If you type man mkfs or mkfs --help you will see there does not seem to be a "-v" option, only "-V" which can mean either --verbose or --version depending on other options, which seems to be rather dumb way to do things.

However if you look at mkfs.ext4 (which mkfs -t ext4 gives you) there is a -v option for "verbose". Each fs has its own set of options. mkfs really is just a wrapper that sends you to the write formatter, so mkfs -t xfs brings up mkfs.xfs etc.