What is the equivalent of the Linux command "sudo fdisk -l" in MacOS?
You can use the 'diskutil' tool for that:
% diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 499.2 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *498.9 GB disk1
As far as I remember...
For Mac OS X:
-
diskutil
(manpage) is a command-line tool for everything Mac OS X can handle, i.e. it will provide as much or more than Disk Utility can do graphically. - For MS-DOS MBR (Master Boot Record) partitioned drives, use
fdisk
(manpage). - For Apple APM (Apple Partition Map) partitioned drives, use
pdisk
(manpage). - For Apple and (U)EFI GPT (GUID Partition Table) partitioned drives, use
gpt
(manpage).
If you want a GPT command that is fdisk-like, you should try gdisk
"GPT fdisk" from Rod Smith. You can find (important) associated information here and download information here.
For Linux:
Modern Linux uses parted
for partitioning, so fdisk
may still be around, but you would really want to use parted
instead.
-
GNU Parted
parted
supports all common partition tables, including MBR, APM and GPT. Most Linux distributions have good manuals for the use ofparted
, i.e. during installation, but I always recommend reading the wikipages from ArchLinux—IMHO they are the best, except that this particular one is currently not very up-to-date (Dec 30 2016)! -
fdisk
is for MBR partitions only. If you try to change the partition table on a GPT partitioned disk, you will instead corrupt the "protective MBR" which is part of the GPT specification.parted
will prevent you from doing that! -
pdisk
has been ported from Darwin (the BSD base of Mac OS X) to Linux, so you could also usepdisk
to create an APM partition table and manage its partitions. The problem is that modern Linux distributions don't include a precompiled package withpdisk
anymore. Status of pdisk -
mac-fdisk
is the way to go on Linux/PowerPC. Most x86 (and x64) distributions don't includemac-fdisk
because it is big-endian only. Looking at Debian you see that only powerpc/powerpc64 packages are available, except for experimental packages for m68k, but not x86. The only Linux I know of that has a workingmac-fdisk
on x86/amd64 is Gentoo Linux. - For GPT partitions
parted
does a great job. If you want an fdisk-like command-line tool, you can use eithergpt
orgdisk
, although there might be more...
To answer your question:
fdisk
on macOS (previously OS X, originally Mac OS X) acts just the same, but you should check for the partitioning scheme used:
- x86-PCs (16-Bit, 32-Bit "i386" and 64-Bit "x64") with BIOS use(d) Master Partition Record (MBR).
- Intel Itanium (IA-64), x86-PCs (IA-32, this includes 64-Bit i.e. amd64 i.e. x64 i.e. x86-64) with UEFI and Intel-Macs, all of them use EFI/UEFI (Universal Extensible Firmware Interface), use the GUID Partition Table (GPT).
- Apple Macintosh running on m86k (Motorola 68000 series of processors) and PowerPC use Apple Partition Map (APM).
This doesn't limit the particular partitioning scheme of external drives, naturally, since all of those computers can use each partitioning scheme on external media if the operating system supports it. But for internal drives, more specifically: boot drives, only the one partitioning scheme can be used.
Therefor: if you use fdisk
on a Mac on an internal drive, you will have no luck, since there is no MBR on that drive. It is either APM or GPT. Likewise, if you use fdisk
on a modern PC with UEFI (or an Intel Mac with EFI) you will only see the protective MBR of the GPT, not the real partition table.
For creating/managing partitions, running fdisk
on an external drive that uses MBR partitioning will work on macOS like it does on Linux.
For listing existing partitions on macOS (Mac OS X), use sudo diskutil list
(see also this great article at OSXDaily.com). On Linux, the equivilant is sudo parted -l
, or if you want a specific drive only, sudo parted /dev/sda print
.