The longtime GNU utility collection lets users work with DOS disks and FAT filesystems without mounting them.
There’s a new release of GNU mtools available. Longtime mtools developer Alain Knaff announced the release of GNU mtools 4.0.50 in an email sent Friday to the info-mtools@gnu.org and the info-gnu@gnu.org mailing lists. The purpose of the release was evidently to apply a fix for CVE-2026-118384, which the release announcement says is the software’s only improvement since the 4.0.49 release.
Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from GNU, Unix, and other Unix-like operating systems without mounting them, to change FAT-specific file attributes (hidden, archive, system), and to format FAT media.
Mtools supports W32 style long file names, FAT32, OS/2 Xdf disks and 2m disks (store up to 1992k on a high density 3 1/2 disk). Mtools also includes mpartition, a simple partitioning program. Also a convenient tool to work with disk image files, through use of the -i flag.
This is pretty much legacy free software. It’s likely been around at least since 1986, since the source code contains a copyright notice attributed to Emmet P. Gray. It didn’t become an official GNU package until March 3, 2009.
For more information on mtools, including links to file downloads, please see the mtools web page: http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools.
The new release can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mtools, as well as from worldwide mirror sites (a list is available at http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html).
The sources can be obtained from ftp.gnu.org and its world-wide mirrors:
- http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mtools/mtools-4.0.50.tar.gz (541K)
SHA-1: d8aab5f83964b1e2158dd95298ee69f0ef525c3a - http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mtools/mtools-4.0.50.tar.bz2 (455K)
SHA-1: eb0cdb3ddfeb048b1fd62d273fd0b0931ee685b5 - http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mtools/mtools-4.0.50.tar.lz (391K)
SHA-1: 319b076eb55677d086cd32b5e93b30f797f6fde3
Mtools is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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