FATLABEL(8)

✨ FATLABEL(8) ✨

System Manager's Manual 💖 okay bestie, this is the manual page for fatlabel 🎀

🧚 NAME

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

💅 SYNOPSIS

fatlabel [OPTIONS] DEVICE [NEW]

🦋 DESCRIPTION

okay so fatlabel is the girlie that lets you display or change the volume label or volume ID on the MS-DOS filesystem sitting on DEVICE 💜 by default it's in label mode, but you can switch to volume ID mode with -i or --volume-id ✨

if you leave out NEW, it just spits the existing label or volume ID out to standard output 👀 a label can't be longer than 11 bytes, and it's giving best compatibility when it's all upper case 🔥 an empty string or a label that's only whitespace is a big no-no 🙈 a volume ID has to be a hexadecimal number (no leading 0x or anything like that) and it must fit into 32 bits 💀

👑 OPTIONS

• -i, --volume-id — switch to volume ID mode, bestie 🦋
• -r, --reset — remove the label in label mode, or generate a brand new ID in volume ID mode 🫶
• -c PAGE, --codepage=PAGE — use DOS codepage PAGE to encode/decode the label 🌸 if you don't pick one, it defaults to codepage 850 💅
• -h, --help — shows a help message and then it bounces 👋
• -V, --version — shows the version number and then it bounces too 🧚

🌈 COMPATIBILITY and BUGS

okay so this part is kind of messy, bestie, but you need to know it 😭

for historic reasons, the FAT label lives in two different spots: the boot sector, and 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 only read the FAT label from the root directory 🙈 if there's no volume label in the root directory, they treat it as empty or no label, even if the boot sector has a perfectly valid one.

when Windows XP or Windows 10 changes a FAT label, it only stores it in the root directory and leaves the boot sector alone 😭 that causes problems when a label gets removed on Windows, because the old label is still hanging out in the boot sector but it's been wiped from the root directory. not it.

dosfslabel prior to version 3.0.7 only worked with FAT labels stored in the boot sector and totally ignored the volume label in the root directory 🥀

dosfslabel in versions 3.0.7–3.0.15 reads FAT labels from the root directory, and if there's nothing there, it fallbacks to the label in the boot sector 💅 changing a label updated the boot sector and sometimes the root directory too, because of a bug 🙃 that bug got fixed in dosfslabel version 3.0.16, and ever since then dosfslabel updates the label in both locations ✨

since version 4.2, fatlabel only reads a FAT label from the root directory (just like MS-DOS and Windows), but it changes a FAT label in both locations 🔥 version 4.2 also fixed how empty labels are handled and labels that start with a byte 0xE5 🧚 it added support for non-ASCII labels based on the DOS codepage you pick, and it added checks to make sure a new label is valid 🫶

it's strongly suggested that you do NOT use dosfslabel prior to version 3.0.16 🚫💀

🌍 DOS CODEPAGES

MS-DOS and Windows use the DOS (OEM) codepage to encode and decode FAT labels 💜 on Windows, the DOS codepage is global for all running apps and can't be configured explicitly 😭 it gets set implicitly by the Language option for non-Unicode programs, which you can find in Regional and Language Options through the Control Panel ✨ the default DOS codepage for fatlabel is 850 🎀 here's the mapping table between DOS codepage and Language for non-Unicode programs, iykyk 👀

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 🐙✨

👩‍💻 AUTHORS

dosfstools were written by Werner Almesberger, Roman Hodek, and others 🌸 the current maintainers are Andreas Bombe and Pali Rohár 💖

bestie, that's the whole page 🎀 dosfstools 4.2 vibes, dated 2021-01-31, and the FATLABEL(8) energy never left 💅🌈