dosfstools For Linux

dosfstools is an open source and free collection of command-line utilities that allow users to easily and quickly create, label and check MS-DOS FAT filesystems on GNU/Linux operating systems.

At the moment, it comprises of the mkfs.fat, which is also known as mkfs.msdos or mkfs.vfat, fsck.fat, which also known as fsck.msdos or fsck.vfat, as well as the fatlabel command-line tools.

To install and use the dosfstools tools in your GNU/Linux operating system, you must first download the latest version from Softpedia, save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents and open a terminal emulator.

On the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files, and execute the ‘make’ command to compile the source code, follow by the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to install the program system wide.

Each of the aforementioned command comes with various command-line options. To see them, you must run each command with the ‘--help’ string. For example, the ‘fatlable’ command accepts two options, the device and the label.

The ‘fsck.fat’ command will help you to automatically repair a filesystem, list path names, perform a verification pass, use DOS codepage to decode short file names, make read-only boot sector checks, toggle the Atari filesystem format or salvage unused chains to files.

On the other hand, the ‘mkfs.fat’ command includes several command-line options that let users to access hidden sectors, backup boot sectors, access reserved sectors, as well as to specify the drive number, logical sector size, volume ID and name, and sectors per cluster.

The software is distributed on several Linux operating systems, including Arch Linux, Debian, Dragora, Fedora, Gentoo, Sabayon, T2, and Ubuntu. The source code and access to the latest, bleeding-edge code (via GitHub), as well as detailed usage information can be found on the official homepage of the project.