SWAPON

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (8)
Updated: 25 September 1995
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NAME

swapon, swapoff - enable/disable devices and files for paging and swapping

SYNOPSIS

/sbin/swapon [-h -V]
/sbin/swapon -a [-v] [-e]
/sbin/swapon [-v] [-p priority] specialfile ...
/sbin/swapon [-s]
/sbin/swapoff [-h -V]
/sbin/swapoff -a
/sbin/swapoff specialfile ...

DESCRIPTION

Swapon is used to specify devices on which paging and swapping are to take place. Calls to swapon normally occur in the system multi-user initialization file /etc/rc making all swap devices available, so that the paging and swapping activity is interleaved across several devices and files.

Normally, the first form is used:

-h: Provide help
-V: Display version
-s: Display swap usage summary by device. Equivalent to "cat /proc/swaps". Not available before Linux 2.1.25.
-a: All devices marked as ``swap'' swap devices in /etc/fstab are made available. Devices that are already running as swap are silently skipped.
-e: When -a is used with swapon, -e makes swapon silently skip devices that do not exist.
-p priority: Specify priority for swapon. This option is only available if swapon was compiled under and is used under a 1.3.2 or later kernel. priority is a value between 0 and 32767. See swapon(2) for a full description of swap priorities. Add pri=value to the option field of /etc/fstab for use with swapon -a.

Swapoff disables swapping on the specified devices and files. When the -a flag is given, swapping is disabled on all known swap devices and files (as found in /proc/swaps or /etc/fstab).

NOTE

You should not use swapon on a file with holes. Swap over NFS may not work.

FILES

/dev/hd?? standard paging devices
/dev/sd?? standard (SCSI) paging devices
/etc/fstab ascii filesystem description table

HISTORY

The swapon command appeared in 4.0BSD.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 00:30:26 GMT, July 27, 2024