gdisk
stands for GPT fdisk. cfdisk
stands for curses fdisk. And so on and so forth.
However, what does the original "f" in fdisk
stand for? The only things I can think of would be either "files" or "floppy", but neither of these make a ton of sense.
Best Answer
I'd gander a guess that it's there for FAT, File Allocation Table. But if you look at Wikipedia the "f" stands for "fixed" as in "fixed disks".
excerpt - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdisk
Window's fdisk?
Granted the above has more to do with the Windows/DOS variant but the term "fixed disk" makes a lot of sense, since hard drives were often termed "fixed" in the olden days.
"fixed disk" definition
The definition of "fixed disk" also says the same.
excerpt - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fixed+disk
Other sources saying the same thing:
Original origins of "fixed disk"
Wikipedia's page on Hard Disk Drives also had this nugget:
excerpt