Format external hard drive to ext4 in command line

Question

How do you format an external hard drive to ext4 via the command line in ubuntu?

Solution

The command is mkfs.ext4, see its man page.

If you are ok with the default settings(1), it's just

mkfs.ext4 /dev/yourpartitionhere

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Footnotes:

(1) from the man page:

The defaults of the parameters for the newly created filesystem, if not overridden by the options listed below, are controlled by the /etc/mke2fs.conf configuration file. See the mke2fs.conf(5) manual page for more details.

Comments

[ss_millionaire]

Okay thanks. How do you get the device information? Like the command to know if it is /dev/sda or /dev/sdb?

[ss_millionaire]

Never mind i got it..its sudo fdisk -l . Thanks

[NZ Dev]

May also need to use fdisk fist to setup the partitions sudo fdisk /dev/sdx -> d -> n -> 1 -> enter -> enter -> w then the above sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdx1 depending on the partitions, it should be /dev/sdx1 most likely it is not /dev/sdx