GNU Parted
GNU Parted is a program for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, copying data between hard disks, and disk imaging.
- documentation is in the doc/ directory. The User's documentation is in texinfo format, and is built into a format viewable by info/pinfo when you run make. i.e.
$ ./configure
$ cd doc
$ make
$ info -f parted.info
Yes, it sucks that you need to run ./configure before you can read the manual. If you have problems with it, doc/parted.texi should be fairly easy to read, just a bit less userfriendly.
If you prefer html format, you can run:
$ cd doc
$ makeinfo --html parted.texi
- an online tutorial is available at http://www.luv.asn.au/overheads/parted
- the GNU Parted home page is http://www.gnu.org/software/parted
- send bug reports, requests for help, feature requests, comments, etc. to bug-parted@gnu.org. The authors can be contacted directly (see the AUTHORS file).
NOTE TO DISTRIBUTIONS
(1) When compiling Parted for distribution for general use, we recommend using the default configuration:
CFLAGS=-Os ./configure
This includes --enable-debug (by default), which contains many assertions. Obviously, these "waste" space, but in the past, they have caught potentially dangerous bugs before they would have done damage, so we think it's worth it. Also, it means we get more bug reports ;)
(2) When doing dependencies, remember that libreiserfs is a soft dependency, so I guess that means Debian-look-alikes should do a "suggests", but not a "requires".
(3) When space is important, we suggest --without-readline, --disable-shared, and possibly --disable-nls and --disable-dynamic-loading.
If Parted is only going to be used for probing / discovery (and not "editing"), there is a --enable-discovery-only and --disable-fs (when you're only interested in partition tables). Since it's readonly, --enable-debug gains you nothing wrt safety, so use --disable-debug ;) The "discover" program is about 35k (gzipped) when compiled this way (not counting libc and libuuid).