Hey, so I was looking through the man page for diskutil (because I don't have a girlfriend), and was really intrigued by the partition command. What confused me though, was there seems to be an entry for formatting of the disk, and then also a format for each drive. Isn't that a bit redundant? Could someone give me an example?

I think what you saw was the partitioning scheme of the disk as a whole (msdos vs. guid vs. ...), and the partition type (linux, fat, hfs, etc.).

I'm unsure of the specific vocabulary, I may have used the wrong one in my answer.

But the principle differences are correct.

@JShoe Type diskutil list in terminal

Here I have 4 partitions - and they all could be blank (although I wouldn't have a bootable Mac in that case)

Air:~ me$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            250.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

The list is a little confusing, since item # 0 is really the whole disk - showing the volume partition scheme (AFS/MBR/GUID_p_t) and the rest of the entries show the format of each disk-volume which are typically HFS+ Journaled but could be non-journaled, case sensitive, EXT3, FAT, exFAT, whatever...

Clarification: I forgot that EFI is actually considered a format

@Diago Things get weird if you start thinking about EFI much

@bmike Agreed

Extremely

@Diago How is 2013 treating you? I haven't seen you around much lately.

@bmike So far not to bad. Real life caught up with me so I decided it is more important then spending a lot of time online

Also I have been moved into full time iOS development so should be around more often

@Diago Sounds good - I'll have to check on your iOS work - anything you can share publicly?

@bmike Not at the moment. I am writing a MobilePOS interface for our retail stores using the iPod and mobile sleeves that can process cc's and do barcode scanning

Most of the stuff or internal or enterprise stuff

But I am hoping to do some stuff outside of the realm as well.

@Diago Nice - that's good work.

There are some amazing programs on the app store struggling to make even a low wage for some good devs. Making things you know will be used day in and out has it's own rewards (if not any fame or glamor)

Agreed

At least I get paid to do it. I don't get a salary cut for going from Pro to Beginner

And I still get to work with the existing languages I use