Manipulate Mac Disk Images

<2019-12-03 二>

Mac Case Insensitive File System

By default, file system under Mac is case insensitive. It may cause trouble when you work with some projects like Linux Kernel. To solve the problem, you can create a disk image with case sensitive file system, and attach to a mount point to use.

Say we want to create disk image at /usr/local, and attach it to /usr/local/src. All operations are executed under /usr/local.

Create Disk Image

$ hdiutil create -size 10G src -type SPARSE -fs \
	'Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+' -volname src

Image src.sparseimage will be created, with case sensitive journaled file system and the size limit 20G.

Attach Disk Image

$ mkdir src
$ hdiutil attach -mountpoint src src.sparseimage #=>
/dev/disk4              GUID_partition_scheme
/dev/disk4s1            EFI
/dev/disk4s2            Apple_HFS            /usr/local/src

Detach Disk Image

$ hdiutil detach src #=>
"disk4" unmounted.
"disk4" ejected.

Resize Disk Image If needed

If 20G is not enough you can resize the image:

$ hdiutil resize -size 20G src.sparseimage