It is a component of various operating systems, including 86-DOS, MS-DOS, IBM PC DOS and OS/2, Microsoft Windows and ReactOS.

The command performs the following actions by default on a floppy disk, hard disk drive, solid state (USB), or other magnetic medium (it will not perform these actions on optical media): Any storage device must have its medium structured to be useful.

The command is also available in Intel ISIS-II,[5] iRMX 86,[6] MetaComCo TRIPOS,[7] AmigaDOS,[8] Zilog Z80-RIO,[9] Microware OS-9,[10] DR FlexOS,[11] TSL PC-MOS,[12] SpartaDOS X,[13] Datalight ROM-DOS,[14] IBM/Toshiba 4690 OS,[15] PTS-DOS,[16] SISNE plus,[17] and in the DEC RT-11[18] operating system.

[21] The ReactOS implementation is based on a free clone developed by Mark Russinovich for Sysinternals in 1998.

[22] It was adapted to ReactOS by Emanuele Aliberti in 1999 and supports FAT, FAT32, FATX, EXT2, and BtrFS filesystems.