How do you make filesystems in OSX? Mac OSX doesn't have the mkfs command.
Best Answer
On BSD-derived Unix systems, newfs is more commonly used than mkfs.
Under Mac OS X, you would use newfs_type as the command, where type is one of hfs, msdos, exfat or udf. There are man pages for all of these. As the other answer mentions, you can use diskutil to create filestems but by using the newfs variants you can set specific filesystem parameters unavailable via diskutil.
No, you can't perform system calls directly because the shell running under Terminal doesn't give you low level access to memory that you would need to call system calls and deal with the results. The shell's job is to make it easy for you to run whole programs. Some of these programs give you a more convenient interface to system calls and other operating system resources. For example, the mv command gives you a pleasant interface to the rename system call. The ln command gives you an interface to the link and symlink system calls. The built-in shell command cd gives you convenient access to chdir. But for the most part system calls provide services too basic to be useful for the shell to provide direct access to them.
Best Answer
On BSD-derived Unix systems, newfs is more commonly used than mkfs.
Under Mac OS X, you would use newfs_type as the command, where type is one of hfs, msdos, exfat or udf. There are man pages for all of these. As the other answer mentions, you can use diskutil to create filestems but by using the newfs variants you can set specific filesystem parameters unavailable via diskutil.