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DUMPE2FS

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: August 2017
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dumpe2fs - dump ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem information

dumpe2fs [ -bfghixV ] [ -o superblock=superblock ] [ -o blocksize=blocksize ] device

dumpe2fs prints the super block and blocks group information for the filesystem present on device.

Note: When used with a mounted filesystem, the printed information may be old or inconsistent.

-b: print the blocks which are reserved as bad in the filesystem.
-o superblock=superblock: use the block superblock when examining the filesystem. This option is not usually needed except by a filesystem wizard who is examining the remains of a very badly corrupted filesystem.
-o blocksize=blocksize: use blocks of blocksize bytes when examining the filesystem. This option is not usually needed except by a filesystem wizard who is examining the remains of a very badly corrupted filesystem.
-f: force dumpe2fs to display a filesystem even though it may have some filesystem feature flags which dumpe2fs may not understand (and which can cause some of dumpe2fs's display to be suspect).
-g: display the group descriptor information in a machine readable colon-separated value format. The fields displayed are the group number; the number of the first block in the group; the superblock location (or -1 if not present); the range of blocks used by the group descriptors (or -1 if not present); the block bitmap location; the inode bitmap location; and the range of blocks used by the inode table.
-h: only display the superblock information and not any of the block group descriptor detail information.
-i: display the filesystem data from an image file created by e2image, using device as the pathname to the image file.
-x: print the detailed group information block numbers in hexadecimal format
-V: print the version number of dumpe2fs and exit.

You need to know the physical filesystem structure to understand the output.

dumpe2fs was written by Remy Card <Remy.Card@linux.org>. It is currently being maintained by Theodore Ts'o <tytso@alum.mit.edu>.

dumpe2fs is part of the e2fsprogs package and is available from http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net.