[Solved] Disk utility to use in scripts

user_naa@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 29 points –

Is there any good alternative to parted, that I can use in scripts? Parted main problem is that it requires user confirmation one each action.

10

Not something I've done before, but have you tried fdisk?

https://linux.die.net/man/8/fdisk

fdisk is completely interactive, not suitable for scripting. sfdisk is a "scriptable fdisk".

Even the manpage Telorand linked mentions it by name for non-interactive use.

Also, make sure you use the right program depending on thr partition table : sgdisk is the right choice for GPT disks, sfdisk is for MBR.

There are few fdisk options that work non-interactively, like -l (list partitions). It is impossible to create or delete partitions this way.

From the sfdisk man page:

Since version 2.26 sfdisk supports MBR (DOS), GPT, SUN and SGI disk labels

Depends on what you're doing. There's workarounds for parted that allow you to do things like grow the size of a partition, but by default, you cannot shrink a partition via command line because the design philosophy of parted is that it should by default try to not delete any data. So growing via command line seems fine, but otherwise not so much.

Here on stackoverflow, there's some directions on how to use the ---pretend-input-tty flag to use parted in a script.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52509644/how-do-i-get-over-parted-confirmation-request-in-a-script

Why there isn't something like --no-confirmation flag?