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GNU Parted
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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
* the GNU Parted FAQ can be found at
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/faq.html
* 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
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(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).