GROWFS(8) — MAINTENANCE COMMANDS

NAME

growfs − non-destructively expand a mounted file system

SYNOPSIS

/usr/etc/growfs [ −M directory-name ] [ newfs-options ] raw-special-device

DESCRIPTION

growfs non-destructively expands a mounted or unmounted file system up to the size of the file system’s partition. growfs is a “friendly” front-end to the newfs(8) program.

This command is most often used after a metadevice has been expanded using metattach(8).

growfs will “write-lock” (see lockfs(8)) a mounted file system when expanding. The length of time the file system is write-locked can be shortened by expanding the file system in stages. For instance, to expand a 1 Gbyte file system to 2 Gbytes, the file system can be grown in 16 Mbyte stages.

Note that growfs displays the same information as mkfs(8) during the expansion of the file system. This is normal behavior for growfs.

You must be super-user to use this command.

If growfs is aborted, the user can recover any lost free space by unmounting the file system and running fsck(8), or the user can issue the growfs command again. If fsck is invoked, it is important under these circumstances that the Sun Online: DiskSuite version of fsck be used rather than SunOS 4.1.1 fsck. The 4.1.1 version may report:

BAD SUPER BLOCK: <some condition reported here>
USE -b OPTION TO FSCK TO SPECIFY LOCATION OF AN ALTERNATE
SUPER-BLOCK TO SUPPLY NEEDED INFORMATION; SEE fsck(8).

If the DiskSuite fsck is not available, try running your version of fsck as follows:

fsck -b16 filesystem

Running fsck this way prevents it from checking the super block.

OPTIONS

-M directory-name
The file system to be expanded is mounted on directory name. File system locking (lockfs) will be used.

newfs-options
The options are documented in the newfs man page.

raw-special-device
is the name of a raw special device residing in /dev, including the disk partition, where you want the new file system to be created.

EXAMPLES

The following example verbosely displays the parameters for the raw special device, rsd0a, but does not actually expand the unmounted file system:

example% /usr/etc/growfs −vN rsd0a
mkfs −G −N /dev/rsd0a 16048 34 8 8192 1024 16 10 60 2048 t 0 -1
/dev/rsd0a:16048 sectors in 59 cylinders of 8 tracks, 34 sectors
8.2Mb in 4 cyl groups (16 c/g, 2.23Mb/g, 896 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck −b#) at:
32, 4432, 8832, 13232,
example%

The following example shows how growfs is used to expand the file system /dev/rsd0a mounted on /var.

example% /usr/etc/growfs −M /var rsd0a
/dev/rsd0a:16048 sectors in 59 cylinders of 8 tracks, 34 sectors
8.2Mb in 4 cyl groups (16 c/g, 2.23Mb/g, 896 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck −b#) at:
32, 4432, 8832, 13232,
example%

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