Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Name

hdiutil

Synopsis

hdiutil command [cmd-specific_args_and_opts] [-quiet | -verbose 
| -debug] [-plist]

Essentially the command-line equivalent of the Disk Copy application, hdiutil manages disk images. The following list highlights some common uses, but the full set of commands (and associated arguments and options) is extensive, and will not be detailed here. See the hdiutil manpage or run hdiutil help for more information.

Options

attach

Attaches a disk image to a device node and mounts it. As arguments, it takes the filename of a disk image and a possible list of options, some of which are:

-help

Prints a usage summary to standard output.

-nomount

Creates device nodes in /dev and attaches the image or its partitions to them, but doesn’t mount them.

-readonly

Disables write access to the mounted image.

-shadow

Passes modifications to the disk image through to a shadow image. Subsequent access to the modified data will be from the shadow, which allows effective read/write access to data on a disk image, which should not or cannot be modified. This option takes the filename of a shadow disk image as an argument, but defaults to the name of the attached image with a .shadow extension. The shadow image is created if it doesn’t already exist.

burn

Burns a disk image to an optical disk (a writable CD or DVD). As arguments, it takes the filename of a disk image and a possible list of options, some of which are:

-erase

Erases an optical disk if the drive and media support erasure. ...