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Documentation / filesystems / hfs.txt

Based on kernel version 2.6.26. Page generated on 2008-07-16 21:12 EST.

1	
2	Macintosh HFS Filesystem for Linux
3	==================================
4	
5	HFS stands for ``Hierarchical File System'' and is the filesystem used
6	by the Mac Plus and all later Macintosh models.  Earlier Macintosh
7	models used MFS (``Macintosh File System''), which is not supported,
8	MacOS 8.1 and newer support a filesystem called HFS+ that's similar to
9	HFS but is extended in various areas.  Use the hfsplus filesystem driver
10	to access such filesystems from Linux.
11	
12	
13	Mount options
14	=============
15	
16	When mounting an HFS filesystem, the following options are accepted:
17	
18	  creator=cccc, type=cccc
19		Specifies the creator/type values as shown by the MacOS finder
20		used for creating new files.  Default values: '????'.
21	
22	  uid=n, gid=n
23	  	Specifies the user/group that owns all files on the filesystems.
24		Default:  user/group id of the mounting process.
25	
26	  dir_umask=n, file_umask=n, umask=n
27		Specifies the umask used for all files , all directories or all
28		files and directories.  Defaults to the umask of the mounting process.
29	
30	  session=n
31	  	Select the CDROM session to mount as HFS filesystem.  Defaults to
32		leaving that decision to the CDROM driver.  This option will fail
33		with anything but a CDROM as underlying devices.
34	
35	  part=n
36	  	Select partition number n from the devices.  Does only makes
37		sense for CDROMS because they can't be partitioned under Linux.
38		For disk devices the generic partition parsing code does this
39		for us.  Defaults to not parsing the partition table at all.
40	
41	  quiet
42	  	Ignore invalid mount options instead of complaining.
43	
44	
45	Writing to HFS Filesystems
46	==========================
47	
48	HFS is not a UNIX filesystem, thus it does not have the usual features you'd
49	expect:
50	
51	 o You can't modify the set-uid, set-gid, sticky or executable bits or the uid
52	   and gid of files.
53	 o You can't create hard- or symlinks, device files, sockets or FIFOs.
54	
55	HFS does on the other have the concepts of multiple forks per file.  These
56	non-standard forks are represented as hidden additional files in the normal
57	filesystems namespace which is kind of a cludge and makes the semantics for
58	the a little strange:
59	
60	 o You can't create, delete or rename resource forks of files or the
61	   Finder's metadata.
62	 o They are however created (with default values), deleted and renamed
63	   along with the corresponding data fork or directory.
64	 o Copying files to a different filesystem will loose those attributes
65	   that are essential for MacOS to work.
66	
67	
68	Creating HFS filesystems
69	===================================
70	
71	The hfsutils package from Robert Leslie contains a program called
72	hformat that can be used to create HFS filesystem. See
73	<http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/> for details.
74	
75	
76	Credits
77	=======
78	
79	The HFS drivers was written by Paul H. Hargrovea (hargrove[AT]sccm.Stanford[DOT]EDU)
80	and is now maintained by Roman Zippel (roman[AT]ardistech[DOT]com) at Ardis
81	Technologies.
82	Roman rewrote large parts of the code and brought in btree routines derived
83	from Brad Boyer's hfsplus driver (also maintained by Roman now).
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