.\" cfdisk.8 -- man page for cfdisk
.\" Copyright 1994 Kevin E. Martin (martin@cs.unc.edu)
.\" Copyright (C) 2014 Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
.\"
.\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
.\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
.\" preserved on all copies.
.\"
.\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
.\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
.\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
.\" permission notice identical to this one.
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.\" " for hilit mode
.TH CFDISK 8 "March 2014" "util-linux" "System Administration"
.SH NAME
cfdisk \- display or manipulate a disk partition table
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B cfdisk
.RB [ options ]
.RI [ device ]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B cfdisk
is a curses-based program for partitioning any block device.
The default device is /dev/sda.
Note that
.B cfdisk
provides basic partitioning functionality by a user friendly interface. If you
need advanced features, use
.BR fdisk (8).
Since version 2.25
.BR cfdisk (8)
supports MBR (DOS), GPT, SUN and SGI disk labels, but it does not provide any
functionality in regards to CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) addressing. CHS has
never been important for Linux and this addressing concept does not make any
sense for new devices.
Since version 2.25
.BR cfdisk (8)
also does not provide a 'print' command. This functionality is provided by
utils
.BR partx (8)
and
.BR lsblk (8)
in a very comfortable and rich way.
If you want to remove an old partition table from a device, use
.BR wipefs (8).
.SH OPTIONS
.IP "\fB\-h, \-\-help\fP"
Display help text and exit.
.IP "\fB\-L\fR, \fB\-\-color\fR[=\fIwhen\fR]"
Colorize output, enabled by default. The optional argument \fIwhen\fP can be
\fBauto\fR, \fBnever\fR or \fBalways\fR. If the \fIwhen\fR argument is omitted,
it defaults to \fBauto\fR.
.IP "\fB-V, \-\-version"
Display version information and exit.
.SH COMMANDS
.B cfdisk
commands can be entered by pressing the desired key (pressing
.I Enter
after the command is not necessary). Here is a list of the available
commands:
.TP
.B b
Toggle the bootable flag of the current partition. This allows you to
select which primary partition is bootable on the drive. This command may not
be available for all partition label types.
.TP
.B d
Delete the current partition. This will convert the current partition
into free space and merge it with any free space immediately
surrounding the current partition. A partition already marked as free
space or marked as unusable cannot be deleted.
.TP
.B h
Print the help screen.
.TP
.B n
Create a new partition from free space.
.B cfdisk
next prompts you for the size of the partition you want to create.
The default size is equal to the entire available free space at the current
position.
The size may be followed by the multiplicative suffixes KiB=1024,
MiB=1024*1024, and so on for GiB, TiB, PiB, EiB, ZiB and YiB (the "iB"
is optional, e.g. "K" has the same meaning as "KiB")
.TP
.B q
Quit the program. This will exit the program without writing any data to
the disk.
.TP
.B t
Change the partition type. By default, new partitions are created as
.I Linux
partitions.
.TP
.B W
Write the partition table to disk (you must enter an uppercase W). Since
this might destroy data on the disk, you must either confirm or deny
the write by entering `yes' or `no'. If you enter `yes',
.B cfdisk
will write the partition table to disk and then tell the kernel to re-read the
partition table from the disk.
The re-reading of the partition table does not work in some cases. In such a
case you need to inform the kernel about new partitions by
.BR partprobe (8),
.BR kpartx (8)
or reboot the system.
.TP
.IR "Up Arrow" , " Down Arrow"
Move the cursor to the previous or next partition. If there are more
partitions than can be displayed on a screen, you can display the next
(previous) set of partitions by moving down (up) at the last (first)
partition displayed on the screen.
.PP
All of the commands can be entered with either upper or lower case
letters (except for
.BR W rite).
When in a sub-menu or at a prompt to enter a filename, you can hit the
.I ESC
key to return to the main command line.
.SH COLORS
Implicit coloring can be disabled by an empty file \fI/etc/terminal-colors.d/cfdisk.disable\fR.
See
.BR terminal-colors.d (5)
for more details about colorization configuration.
.B cfdisk
does not support colors customization by color scheme file.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR fdisk (8),
.BR sfdisk (8),
.BR parted (8),
.BR partprobe (8),
.BR partx(8)
.SH AUTHOR
Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
.PP
The current cfdisk implemntation is based on the original cfdisk
from Kevin E. Martin (martin@cs.unc.edu).
.SH AVAILABILITY
The cfdisk command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
