E2FREEFRAG(8)

📦
version 1.47.4 · 6 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable, ubuntu stonking

💖 E2FREEFRAG — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so real talk: this is e2freefrag, from section 8 of the System Manager's Manual (yes that's the "sysadmin commands" shelf, very main character). Let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

e2freefrag — report free space fragmentation information

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

e2freefrag [ -c chunk_kb ] [ -h ] filesys

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so e2freefrag is the girl who tells you how fragmented the free space on your ext2/3/4 file systems is. She's nosy in the best way 💅

filesys is the file system device name — think /dev/hdc1, /dev/md0, that whole vibe.

What she actually does: she scans the block bitmap information to check how many free blocks are chillin' there as contiguous and aligned free space. Then she reports the percentage of contiguous free blocks of size and of alignment chunk_kb. ✨

She also serves you the minimum/maximum/average free chunk size in the file system, plus a whole histogram of all free chunks. Iconic, honestly.

What's it all for? So you can gauge the level of free space fragmentation in the file system. iykyk 🔥

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -c chunk_kb — if you specify a chunk size, e2freefrag will print how many free chunks of size chunk_kb are available, in units of kilobytes (Kb). ⚠️ heads up bestie: the chunk size must be a power of two and must be larger than the file system block size. no cap.
  • -h — prints the usage of the program. the classic "help me pls" button 🙈

🎀 EXAMPLE 🎀

# e2freefrag /dev/vgroot/lvhome
Device: /dev/vgroot/lvhome
Blocksize: 4096 bytes
Total blocks: 1504085
Free blocks: 292995 (19.5%)

Min. free extent: 4 KB
Max. free extent: 24008 KB
Avg. free extent: 252 KB

HISTOGRAM OF FREE EXTENT SIZES:
Extent Size Range :   Free extents   Free Blocks  Percent
    4K...    8K- :           704           704     0.2%
    8K...   16K- :           810          1979     0.7%
   16K...   32K- :           843          4467     1.5%
   32K...   64K- :           579          6263     2.1%
   64K...  128K- :           493         11067     3.8%
  128K...  256K- :           394         18097     6.2%
  256K...  512K- :           281         25477     8.7%
  512K... 1024K- :           253         44914    15.3%
    1M...    2M- :           143         51897    17.7%
    2M...    4M- :            73         50683    17.3%
    4M...    8M- :            37         52417    17.9%
    8M...   16M- :             7         19028     6.5%
   16M...   32M- :             1          6002     2.0%

look at that histogram, she ATE 🌈⭐

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This version of e2freefrag was written by Rupesh Thakare, and modified by Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>, and Kalpak Shah. legends only 🫶

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

debugfs(8), dumpe2fs(8), e2fsck(8)

and that's the whole page bestie 💖 this was E2fsprogs version 1.47.4, dated March 2025 — slay, stay unfragmented, mwah 💅✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from