parted -- why?

[Tracy_Baker]

So I'm doing RHEL 8, RH134, Chapter 6 on Managing Basic Storage.

It turns out that the only partitioning program that is covered is parted.

Now, I'll admit: I've never used parted (although I know others that do). I thought, OK, now is the time to get into it an practice it.

When going through the material, I read this "Keep in mind that parted makes the changes immediately. A mistake with parted could definitely lead to data loss."

EDIT: I just found out that by typing parted it brings up a menu, which it should. However, it automatically chooses the first block device (in my case /dev/sda). Again, this is a really dangerous position to put new students into, especially given the previous message. 

This really, really, really begs the question: Why aren't gdisk and/or fdisk covered in the course material?

From what I know (and I'm far from being an expert), gdisk can do what parted does -- only much more safely -- as it doesn't write out the partition until the users explcitily tells it to.

If I'm right, why would you be teaching new students exclusively about a tool that writes partitions immediately?

If I'm wrong, what am I missing?

(...and udevadm settle? What about partprobe?)

Anyone what to chime in and explain why I should teach parted and not gdisk (and maybe fdisk)?

[oouk20]

I'm fairly new to disk partitioning as I've never used gdisk or fdisk before.

Somewhere in the chapter mentions that parted can be easily used in scripts. Parted can be used interactively or noninteractively which is probably why they included it.

Not sure as to why exclusively.

[Tracy_Baker]

After working my way through the chapter, I came to appreciate parted's ability to run scripted and non-interactively.