I was perusing man pages, it’s here I could think of some tired joke about the movie, any way trying to solve a problem I came across this while reading, “man gpart”
" To list the available modules and their weights use the -L option.
- After having checked the output of gpart at least thrice, the primary partition table can be written back to the device this way:
gpart -W /dev/sdc /dev/sdc
This of course may be extremely dangerous to your health and social security, so beware."
gpart is not actively maintained, it is a legacy program (still useful to find partition info or file systems that don’t show up when you think they should, as it ignores any info already there and just searches, *BUT this also means it will simply ovewrwrite anything there if you were to issue commands like that you show in your post!)
If you want a command line option for partitioning and formatting, use fdisk to create partition structures and mkfs to create file systems on those partitions. They are part of the util-linux package and should be on your system already;