Partitioning disks from the command line

Formatting and partitioning hard disk isn’t the exclusive domain of graphical tools. Shashank Sharma reveals the utilities that can make space for Linux.

- Shashank Sharma

Despite the constant push for user-friendly and intuitive graphical applications over the past decade, command-line utilities remain popular for performing a vast number of tasks. Whether its cloning your disk, transferring files across the network, communicating with peers, or even accessing social media, you can do it all from the relative comfort of the Linux shell.

Partitioning the hard disk, however, is one area where many users still prefer the point-and-click convenience of graphical tools. This is mostly because of lack of familiarity and not because the tools are lacking in abilities. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Linux users had to contend with only command-line tools to perform partitioning. In fact, fdisk is still the default, and it’s the only partitioning tool on some Linux distributions such as Slackware.

In this tutorial we’ll discuss all the functions you might have to perform to carve space on the disk for your distribution, such as creating and deleting a partition, and more. If you’re interested in learning whether partitions can be resized from the command-line too, refer to the Resizing Partitions box (below left).

The fdisk utility, along with many other tools, are part of the linux-utils package that’s part of the default installation on Linux distributions.

Not an expletive

The powerful fdisk utility can be used to create and delete partitions on the disk, so you must use it with extreme caution or risk losing all data on your disk. You can run the sudo fdisk -l command to get the utility to list all the partitions on the specified device: