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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | COMPATIBILITY and BUGS | DOS CODEPAGES | SEE ALSO | HOMEPAGE | AUTHORS | COLOPHON |
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FATLABEL(8) System Manager's Manual FATLABEL(8)
fatlabel - set or get MS-DOS filesystem label or volume ID
fatlabel [OPTIONS] DEVICE [NEW]
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.
-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.
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.
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
fsck.fat(8), mkfs.fat(8)
The home for the dosfstools project is its GitHub project page
⟨https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools⟩.
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⟩.
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 2025-08-11. (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)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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