[parted-devel] marking a filesystem ID with parted

[Jim Meyering]

Teresa e Junior wrote:
> Hello! Firstly, I was in doubt to which mailing list I should ask this question!

bug-parted at gnu.org is preferred.  No big deal.

    $ parted --help|tail -1
    Report bugs to bug-parted at gnu.org

> I need to implement disk partitioning in an application written by me. I know I
> should change de ID of the partition with something like "sfdisk --id" before
> running mkfs*, but `man sfdisk' says:
>
>        sfdisk  doesn't  understand  GUID  Partition  Table (GPT) and it is not
>        designed for large partitions. In particular case use more advanced GNU
>        parted(8).
>
> and when running `parted mkfs [...]':
>
> WARNING: you are attempting to use parted to operate on (mkfs) a file system.
> parted's file system manipulation code is not as robust as what you'll find in
> dedicated, file-system-specific packages like e2fsprogs.  We recommend
> you use parted only to manipulate partition tables, whenever possible.
> Support for performing most operations on most types of file systems
> ****will be removed in an upcoming release.****
>
> sfdisk tells me not to use it, and parted too! I just want to set the ID of the
> filesystem and, since I should expect users with different kinds of hardware,
> what is recommended then? I tried to get the output from GParted, but it does
> not tell how it does so.

In that case, use parted's mkpart sub-command rather than mkfs
mkpart lets you set the ID, but unlike mkfs, does not try to
create a file system.