fatlabel(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | COMPATIBILITY and BUGS | DOS CODEPAGES | SEE ALSO | HOMEPAGE | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

FATLABEL(8)              System Manager's Manual             FATLABEL(8)

NAME         top

       fatlabel - set or get MS-DOS filesystem label or volume ID

SYNOPSIS         top

       fatlabel [OPTIONS] DEVICE [NEW]

DESCRIPTION         top

       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         top

       -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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       fsck.fat(8), mkfs.fat(8)

HOMEPAGE         top

       The home for the dosfstools project is its GitHub project page 
       ⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools⟩.

AUTHORS         top

       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         top

       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 2023-12-22.
       (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

dosfstools 4.2+git             2021-01-31                    FATLABEL(8)

Pages that refer to this page: fstab(5)dosfsck(8)fsck.fat(8)fsck.msdos(8)fsck.vfat(8)mkdosfs(8)mkfs.fat(8)mkfs.msdos(8)mkfs.vfat(8)