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tune2fs - adjust tunable filesystem parameters on ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems

tune2fs allows the system administrator to adjust various tunable filesystem parameters on Linux ext2, ext3, or ext4 filesystems.

The current values of these options can be displayed by using the -l option to tune2fs(8) program, or by using the dumpe2fs(8) program.

Adjust the number of mounts after which the filesystem will be checked by e2fsck(8). If max-mount-counts is 0 or -1, the number of times the filesystem is mounted will be disregarded by e2fsck(8) and the kernel.Staggering the mount-counts at which filesystems are forcibly checked will avoid all filesystems being checked at one time when using journaled filesystems.

Set the number of times the filesystem has been mounted. If set to a greater value than the max-mount-counts parameter set by the -c option, e2fsck(8) will check the filesystem at the next reboot.

Getting the current Values:

Example:

So for a system that contains 5 partitions and is booted approximately once a month you could do the following to stagger the mount counts:

Using tune2fs to free up disk space.

We usually encounter issues, where a partition becomes 100% full, say if you get / as 100%, you even can’t edit the fstab entries.

In such instance, you can use the tune2fs command to free up disk space, since for every file system under Unix, approximately 5% of disk space is reserved for the “root” user.

The only risk in setting zero reserved blocks is that, other Unix users can fill the file system to 100%.