5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk with hand-written label on it.
The command was originally designed to label floppy disks as a reminder of which one is in the machine. However, it can also be applied to other types of drive such as mapped drives.[5]
It is available in MS-DOS versions 3.1 and later and IBM PC DOS releases 3 and later.[6]
It is an external command. MS-DOS 4.0x and earlier used label.com as the external file. MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows use label.exe as the external file.[7]DR DOS 6.0 includes an implementation of the label command.[8] The FreeDOS version was developed by Joe Cosentino and is licensed under the GPL.[9]
In modern versions of Microsoft Windows, changing the disk label requires elevated permissions.[5] The Windows dir command displays the volume label and serial number (if it has one) as part of the directory listing.
In Unix and other Unix-like operating systems, the name of the equivalent command differs from file system to file system. For instance, the command e2label can be used for ext2 partitions.
Volume labels can contain as many as 11 character bytes and can include spaces, but no tabs. The characters are in the OEM code page of the system that created the label.
John Paul Mueller (2007). Windows Administration at the Command Line for Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN978-0470165799.
