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GROWFS(8) System Manager's Manual GROWFS(8)

growfsgrow size of an existing ffs file system

growfs [-Nqy] [-s size] special

The growfs utility extends the newfs(8) program. Before starting growfs, the partition must be set to a larger size using disklabel(8). The growfs utility extends the size of the file system on the specified special file.

Currently growfs can only enlarge unmounted file systems. Do not try enlarging a mounted file system - your system may panic and you will not be able to use the file system any longer. Most of the newfs(8) options cannot be changed by growfs. In fact, you can only increase the size of the file system. Use tunefs(8) for other changes.

The following options are available:

Test mode. Causes the new file system parameters to be printed out without actually enlarging the file system.
Operate in quiet mode. With this option, growfs will not print extraneous information like superblock backups.
size
Determines the size of the file system after enlarging in sectors. This value defaults to the size of the raw partition specified in special (in other words, growfs will enlarge the file system to the size of the entire partition).
Expert mode. Usually growfs will ask you if you have taken a backup of your data and will test whether special is currently mounted. The -y flag suppresses this, so use this option with great care!

If set to a positive integer, output is formatted to the given width in columns. Otherwise, growfs defaults to the terminal width, or 80 columns if the output is not a terminal.

disklabel(8), dumpfs(8), fdisk(8), fsck(8), newfs(8), tunefs(8)

The growfs utility first appeared in FreeBSD 4.4 and has been available since OpenBSD 3.4.

Christoph Herrmann <chm@FreeBSD.org>
Thomas-Henning von Kamptz <tomsoft@FreeBSD.org>
and the growfs team <growfs@tomsoft.com>

Filesystems must be checked with fsck(8) after enlarging.

October 17, 2017 OpenBSD-6.8