Root/Documentation/filesystems/hfs.txt

1
2Macintosh HFS Filesystem for Linux
3==================================
4
5HFS stands for ``Hierarchical File System'' and is the filesystem used
6by the Mac Plus and all later Macintosh models. Earlier Macintosh
7models used MFS (``Macintosh File System''), which is not supported,
8MacOS 8.1 and newer support a filesystem called HFS+ that's similar to
9HFS but is extended in various areas. Use the hfsplus filesystem driver
10to access such filesystems from Linux.
11
12
13Mount options
14=============
15
16When 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
45Writing to HFS Filesystems
46==========================
47
48HFS is not a UNIX filesystem, thus it does not have the usual features you'd
49expect:
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
55HFS does on the other have the concepts of multiple forks per file. These
56non-standard forks are represented as hidden additional files in the normal
57filesystems namespace which is kind of a cludge and makes the semantics for
58the 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
68Creating HFS filesystems
69===================================
70
71The hfsutils package from Robert Leslie contains a program called
72hformat that can be used to create HFS filesystem. See
73<http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/> for details.
74
75
76Credits
77=======
78
79The HFS drivers was written by Paul H. Hargrovea (hargrove@sccm.Stanford.EDU)
80and is now maintained by Roman Zippel (roman@ardistech.com) at Ardis
81Technologies.
82Roman rewrote large parts of the code and brought in btree routines derived
83from Brad Boyer's hfsplus driver (also maintained by Roman now).
84

Archive Download this file



interactive