hfsutils1

Usage

Overview

hfsutils is a collection of tools and programs for accessing Macintosh HFS-formatted volumes. See the accompanying man page for each program above for more information.

Notes

These utilities can manipulate HFS volumes on nearly any medium. A UNIX path is initially specified to hmount or hformat which gives the location of the volume. This path can be a block device -- corresponding to, for example, a floppy disk, CD-ROM, SCSI disk, or other device -- or it can be a regular file containing an image of any of the above.

The medium specified by the UNIX path may or may not contain an Apple partition map. If partitioned, it is possible for more than one HFS volume to be present on the medium. In this case, a partition number must also be given which selects the desired partition. This number refers to the nth ordinal HFS partition on the volume. (Other, non-HFS partitions are ignored.) Partition number 0 refers to the entire medium, disregarding the partition map, if any.

HFS pathnames consist of colon-separated components. Unlike UNIX pathnames, an HFS path which begins with a colon (e.g. :Foo:Bar) is a relative path, and one which does not (e.g. Foo:Bar) is an absolute path. As sole exception to this rule, a path not containing any colons is assumed to be relative.

Absolute pathnames always begin with the name of the volume itself. Any occurrence of two or more consecutive colons in a path causes resolution of the path to ascend into parent directories.

Most of the command-line programs support HFS filename globbing. The following forms of globbing are supported:

*

matches zero or more characters.

?

matches exactly one character.

[...]

matches any single character enclosed within the brackets. A character range may be specified by using a hypen (-). Note that matches are not case sensitive.

{...,...}

expands into the Cartesian product of each specified substring.

\\

causes the following character to be matched literally.

Note that since globbing is performed by each HFS command rather than by the UNIX shell (which knows nothing about HFS volumes), care should always be taken to protect pathnames from the shell by using an appropriate quoting technique. Typically it is best to surround HFS pathnames containing glob characters with single quotes (').

Time stamps on HFS volumes are interpreted as being relative to the current time zone. This means that modification dates on HFS volumes written in another time zone may appear to be off by some number of hours.

Hardware limitations prevent some systems from reading or writing native Macintosh 800K floppy disks; only high-density 1440K disks can be used on these systems.

The obsolete MFS volume format is not supported by this software.