Documentation/filesystems/hfs.txt

   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@sccm.Stanford.EDU)
  80 and is now maintained by Roman Zippel (roman@ardistech.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).