Re: "parted" vs "sfdisk"

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2016, Andrew Bradford wrote:

> Hi Robert,
>
> On 08/05 06:19, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >
> >   your personal opinions, if you would -- i'm working on some scripts
> > to do automated installs on a target board, currently based on
> > parted, but parted seems a bit dense at times, and awkward, and i'm
> > thinking of switching to sfdisk.
> >
> >   for people who have done this sort of thing, do you have any strong
> > opinions either way of parted versus sfdisk? i realize that's not much
> > to go on, just curious about personal preferences, and why.
>
> sfdisk has changed both its input format and command-line options in
> recent versions of util-linux.  If you're scripting sfdisk, you need to
> be aware of this as some of the people who use your scripts will have
> varying versions of util-linux.  For example, in my experience,
> util-linux 2.28 in Debian Stretch and util-linux 2.25.2 in Debian Jessie
> cannot have their sfdisk executables scripted in the same way and then
> produce the same set of partitions when setting up an SD card for an
> embedded system.
>
> The change in input format and command-line options happened around
> util-linux 2.26-2.27 but I haven't dug into it too much to find out
> exactly when.
>
> The newer input format for sfdisk is quite nice, imho, and easy to read.
> You can do something like this now:
>
> {
> echo "label: dos"
> echo "start=1MiB size=32MiB type=0x0C bootable"
> echo "start=33MiB"
> } | sfdisk ${DEVICE}
>
> While the older sfdisk input format would look something like:
>
> {
> echo 1,32,0x0C,*
> echo 33,,,-
> } | sfdisk ${DEVICE}

  ah, now *that* i like ... of course, i'd probably use a here
document:

sfdisk ${DEVICE} <<-EOF
	label: dos
	start=1MiB size=32MiB type=0x0C bootable
	start=33MiB"
EOF

pretty sure that would have the same effect, yes?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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