HFS(1)

💖 HFS(1) — the shell for manipulating HFS volumes 💖

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for hfs, living in the General Commands Manual section. Think of it as your group chat with an old Mac volume. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

hfs — shell for manipulating HFS volumes

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

hfs [hfs-path [partition-no]]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

hfs is an interactive command-oriented tool for manipulating HFS volumes. no cap. it's giving "I talk to vintage Mac disks and I'm not sorry." 💅

and here's the tea: hfs is based on the Tcl interpreter, so you can use basic Tcl constructs in addition to the commands below. two languages, one shell, main character energy fr fr. 👑

the commands (aka the whole menu, do not skip a single one)

• mount path [partition-no] — the specified UNIX path gets opened as an HFS volume. if you pass a partition number n and the volume source lives on a partitioned medium, the *n*th discovered HFS partition gets mounted. the default partition-no is 1.
• umount [path] — unmounts the volume that was previously mounted from the specified path. if you don't give a path, it unmounts the current volume. bye bestie 👋
• vol path — makes the volume previously mounted from the specified path the current volume.
• info — shows general info about the currently mounted volume. fun fact: this also pops up automatically when you mount a volume. it just wants attention. 💖
• pwd — shows the full path to the current working HFS directory.
• cd [hfs-path] — changes the current working directory to the given HFS path. if you give no path, it chills you at the root of the volume.
• dir [hfs-path] — shows a directory listing of the specified HFS directory. no path? you get the contents of the current working directory. ✨
• mkdir hfs-path — creates a new, empty directory at the specified path.
• rmdir hfs-path — removes the specified directory. it must be empty, no exceptions, no negotiating. 💀
• create hfs-path [type [creator]] — creates an empty file at the specified path. you can specify the Macintosh type and creator, or they default to TEXT and UNIX, respectively.
• del hfs-path — deletes both forks of the specified file. both of them. gone. 😭
• stat hfs-path — displays status info about the entity identified by the specified HFS path.
• cat hfs-path — displays the data fork of the specified HFS file.
• copyin unix-path [hfs-path [mode]] — copies the specified UNIX file to the named HFS destination path. unless you say otherwise, the file goes into the current HFS working directory using a heuristically chosen mode. the mode can be one of: macb (MacBinary II), binh (BinHex), text, or raw.
• copyout hfs-path [unix-path [mode]] — copies the specified HFS file into the named UNIX destination path. unless you say otherwise, the file goes into the current UNIX working directory using a heuristically chosen mode. same modes as copyin, bestie. 🧚
• format path [partition-no [volume-name]] — initializes the specified UNIX path as an empty HFS volume with the given name, and then mounts that volume. default volume name is Untitled. iconic default, honestly. 🌈

the plot twist 👀

the shell is scriptable, but you should understand that all of the commands above are actually implemented by Tcl procedures prefixed with the character "h" — like hmount, hcd, etc. — specifically to avoid name collisions with other Tcl utilities. so the "h" is there for a reason, iykyk.

for convenience, in interactive use you're allowed to omit the "h". periodt. 💅

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• hfsutils(1)
• xhfs(1)

💀 BUGS 💀

listen. cat can only display the data fork of a file. that's it. that's the limit.

also: text translations are performed unconditionally on the output. no asking, no opt-out.

and binary data cannot be handled properly from within Tcl scripts, because the character with value 0 cannot be represented in Tcl strings. tragic. genuinely tragic. 😭

if you need to copy files without these limitations, use copyout. it's the way. 🫶

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Robert Leslie <rob@mars.org>

and that's the whole page, bestie — brought to you by HFSUTILS, dated 15-Jan-1997, which is giving vintage in the absolute best way. slay, go mount a volume, you've got this 💖✨