dosfslabel(8) — Linux manual page
FATLABEL(8) System Manager's Manual FATLABEL(8)
NAME
fatlabel - set or get MS-DOS filesystem label or volume ID
SYNOPSIS
fatlabel [OPTIONS] DEVICE [NEW]
DESCRIPTION
fatlabel will display or change the volume label or volume ID on
the MS-DOS filesystem located on DEVICE. By default it works in
label mode. It can be switched to volume ID mode with the option
-i or --volume-id.
If NEW is omitted, then the existing label or volume ID is
written to the standard output. A label can't be longer than 11
bytes and should be in all upper case for best compatibility. An
empty string or a label consisting only of white space is not
allowed. A volume ID must be given as a hexadecimal number (no
leading "0x" or similar) and must fit into 32 bits.
OPTIONS
-i, --volume-id
Switch to volume ID mode.
-r, --reset
Remove label in label mode or generate new ID in volume ID
mode.
-c PAGE, --codepage=PAGE
Use DOS codepage PAGE to encode/decode label. By default
codepage 850 is used.
-h, --help
Display a help message and terminate.
-V, --version
Show version number and terminate.
COMPATIBILITY and BUGS
For historic reasons FAT label is stored in two different
locations: in the boot sector and as a special volume label entry
in the root directory. MS-DOS 5.00, MS-DOS 6.22, MS-DOS 7.10,
Windows 98, Windows XP and also Windows 10 read FAT label only
from the root directory. Absence of the volume label in the root
directory is interpreted as empty or none label, even if boot
sector contains some valid label.
When Windows XP or Windows 10 system changes a FAT label it
stores it only in the root directory — letting boot sector
unchanged. Which leads to problems when a label is removed on
Windows. Old label is still stored in the boot sector but is
removed from the root directory.
dosfslabel prior to the version 3.0.7 operated only with FAT
labels stored in the boot sector, completely ignoring a volume
label in the root directory.
dosfslabel in versions 3.0.7–3.0.15 reads FAT labels from the
root directory and in case of absence, it fallbacks to a label
stored in the boot sector. Change operation resulted in updating
a label in the boot sector and sometimes also in the root
directory due to the bug. That bug was fixed in dosfslabel
version 3.0.16 and since this version dosfslabel updates label in
both location.
Since version 4.2, fatlabel reads a FAT label only from the root
directory (like MS-DOS and Windows systems), but changes a FAT
label in both locations. In version 4.2 was fixed handling of
empty labels and labels which starts with a byte 0xE5. Also in
this version was added support for non-ASCII labels according to
the specified DOS codepage and were added checks if a new label
is valid.
It is strongly suggested to not use dosfslabel prior to version
3.0.16.
DOS CODEPAGES
MS-DOS and Windows systems use DOS (OEM) codepage for encoding
and decoding FAT label. In Windows systems DOS codepage is
global for all running applications and cannot be configured
explicitly. It is set implicitly by option Language for non-
Unicode programs available in Regional and Language Options via
Control Panel. Default DOS codepage for fatlabel is 850. See
following mapping table between DOS codepage and Language for
non-Unicode programs:
Codepage Language
437 English (India), English (Malaysia), English (Republic
of the Philippines), English (Singapore), English
(South Africa), English (United States), English
(Zimbabwe), Filipino, Hausa, Igbo, Inuktitut,
Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, Yoruba
720 Arabic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Uyghur
737 Greek
775 Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian
850 Afrikaans, Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan,
Corsican, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English
(Belize), English (Canada), English (Caribbean),
English (Ireland), English (Jamaica), English (New
Zealand), English (Trinidad and Tobago), English
(United Kingdom), Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian,
Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Indonesian,
Irish, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Italian, K'iche, Lower
Sorbian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Mapudungun, Mohawk,
Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Quechua, Romansh,
Sami, Scottish Gaelic, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana,
Spanish, Swedish, Tamazight, Upper Sorbian, Welsh,
Wolof
852 Albanian, Bosnian (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Hungarian,
Polish, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian,
Turkmen
855 Bosnian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Cyrillic)
857 Azeri (Latin), Turkish, Uzbek (Latin)
862 Hebrew
866 Azeri (Cyrillic), Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian,
Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Russian, Tajik, Tatar,
Ukrainian, Uzbek (Cyrillic), Yakut
874 Thai
932 Japanese
936 Chinese (Simplified)
949 Korean
950 Chinese (Traditional)
1258 Vietnamese
SEE ALSO
fsck.fat(8), mkfs.fat(8)
HOMEPAGE
The home for the dosfstools project is its GitHub project page
⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools⟩.
AUTHORS
dosfstools were written by Werner Almesberger
⟨werner.almesberger@lrc.di.epfl.ch⟩, Roman Hodek ⟨Roman.Hodek@
informatik.uni-erlangen.de⟩, and others. Current maintainers are
Andreas Bombe ⟨aeb@debian.org⟩ and Pali Rohár ⟨pali.rohar@
gmail.com⟩.
COLOPHON
This page is part of the dosfstools (Tools for making and
checking MS-DOS FAT filesystems) project. Information about the
project can be found at
⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools⟩. If you have a bug
report for this manual page, see
⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues⟩. This page was
obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools.git⟩ on 2024-06-14.
(At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found
in the repository was 2023-10-10.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org