e2fsprogs (sometimes called the e2fs programs) is a set of utilities for maintaining the ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems.

Since those file systems are often the default for Linux distributions, it is commonly considered to be essential software.

Although ext3's journaling capability can reduce the need to use e2fsck, it is sometimes still necessary to help protect against kernel bugs or bad hardware.

With ext4 the e2fsck runtime should come down considerably, as can be seen from the graph.

However, they have been ported to other systems, such as FreeBSD and Darwin.