Open Source Documentation

Found in the manual page for a command named mkswap.

-f Force - go ahead even if the command is stupid. This allows the creation of a swap area larger than the file or partition it resides on. On SPARC, force creation of the swap area. Without this option mkswap will refuse to create a v0 swap on a device with a valid SPARC superblock, as that probably means one is going to erase the partition table.

Makes sense to me. I've put a couple of these up. There are some real gems in the manual pages in Linux in general. It is to do with open source and lack of committee oversight. this is good thing.