I have formatted a firewire hard drive with the following command:

/sbin/mkfs.msdos -F 32 -I /dev/sdb -n TEST_VOLUME

It formats correctly and when mounted on Windows or
Mac OS X correctly displays the label TEST_VOLUME.
However, I have not been able to find a way to access the
volume name on Linux.

Anyone know the magic incantation?

Thanks.

What do you mean you want to access the volume name? Do you
want to be able to mount the disk using the volume name, or do you
want to be able to find out what is the volume name after it's been
mounted?

The latter--after it's mounted I would like to be able to
display the volume name in a Java app, so either a Unix
command or a C program that can print it would be fine.

cfdisk will show a volume label, but i don't
know how to get it to list the info and exit.
I guess you could get the source take out
the part you want.

Thanks for the suggestion.

After much Googling and testing I came up with a solution that
does the job and seems fairly clean. The key is the mlabel
command, but rather than hardcoding every possible device
name into the mtools config file I create one on the fly that
defines only the device I'm interested in at the time I run the
commands. The following demonstrates the idea:

cat > /tmp/mtools.conf << EOF
drive c: file="/dev/sdb1"
EOF
MTOOLSRC=/tmp/mtools.conf
mlabel -s c: | awk '{ print $4 }'
rm /tmp/mtools.conf

BTW, if anyone is interested, the volname command can
be used to print the label for an ISO-9660 filesystem and
e2label prints the label for an ext2 filesystem.