debugfs command not found

Question

When I try to use debugfs on my Macbook pro(10.6.8) I get

-bash: debugfs: command not found

Then I try to look at my path

echo $PATH

I get

/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/texbin:/usr/X11/bin

which seems pretty much everything.

Where is my debugfs command? How can I reinstall it?

Answer 1

There is no debugfs(8) on Mac OS X. Debugfs(8) is a Linux program used to debug the Linux file system ext2/ext3. If you want to debug a Mac filesystem like HFS+ try fsck(8) or use Disk Utility.

If you really want to debug a Linux ext2/ext3 filesystem on a Mac (e.g. an external Linux USB disk) you will have to install ext2/3 first. Since you have /opt/local/bin in your path I suppose you have MacPorts installed. In this case you could just install the packet ext2fuse which includes the debugfs(8) program.

Answer 2

You can install e2fsprogs, including debugfs, using Homebrew on OsX.

brew install e2fsprogs

You will find debugfs in /usr/local/opt/e2fsprogs/sbin/debugfs