While reading the man page for fdisk I came across this interesting text:
There are several *fdisk programs around. Each has its problems and strengths. Try them in the order cfdisk, fdisk, sfdisk. (Indeed, cfdisk is a beautiful program that has strict requirements on the parti‐ tion tables it accepts, and produces high quality partition tables. Use it if you can. fdisk is a buggy program that does fuzzy things - usually it happens to produce reasonable results. Its single advantage is that it has some support for BSD disk labels and other non-DOS partition tables. Avoid it if you can. sfdisk is for hackers only -- the user interface is terrible, but it is more correct than fdisk and more powerful than both fdisk and cfdisk. Moreover, it can be used noninteractively.)
I notice that the option formats are not the same for the two applications:
- melancholy():/$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00036f1b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 39063551 19530752 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 39063552 976771071 468853760 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00085251
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 2048 15624191 7811072 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc2 * 15624192 64452607 24414208 83 Linux
/dev/sdc3 64454654 1953523711 944534529 5 Extended
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sdc5 64454656 1953523711 944534528 83 Linux
- melancholy():/$ sudo cfdisk -l
cfdisk: invalid option -- 'l'
Usage:
Print version:
cfdisk -v
Print partition table:
cfdisk -P {r|s|t} [options] device
Interactive use:
cfdisk [options] device
Options:
-a: Use arrow instead of highlighting;
-z: Start with a zero partition table, instead of reading the pt from disk;
-c C -h H -s S: Override the kernel's idea of the number of cylinders,
the number of heads and the number of sectors/track.
Copyright (C) 1994-2002 Kevin E. Martin & aeb
Is there real merit in switching to using cfdisk instead of fdisk, or is the man page note a historical observation that is no longer valid? Since fdisk works fine for listing the disks info (-l flag) should I use cfdisk only for altering the partitions and partition tables? What are the real strengths and weaknesses of each application?
