Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Name

mount_volfs

Synopsis

mount_volfs [-o mount_options] mount_point

Mounts the volfs filesystem in /.vol. The volfs filesystem enables the Carbon File Manager API to map a file ID to a file, without knowing the BSD path to it. Thus, HFS aliases, which use file IDs, remain consistent, even if the targets of the aliases move around within the volume.

The /.vol directory contains subdirectories named with numeric IDs, each associated with a volume on the system. While the directories appear empty if listed, with a file or directory ID, you can access any object on those volumes. A file ID is a unique number associated with each file on a volume (analogous to an inode number on a UFS-formatted filesystem) and can be viewed with the -i option of ls.

If you know a file’s ID, you can access it as /.vol/ vol_ID / file_ID. If you know the ID of the directory the file is in, you can also access it as /.vol/ vol_ID / dir_ID / filename. The root directory of a volume always has a directory ID of 2, so you can map volume IDs to volumes with:

%cd /.vol/
                     vol_ID
                     /2; pwd

Options

-o

Take -o options as listed in the mount manpage. Not normally used for mount_volfs.

mount_point

The directory on which the filesystem is mounted, normally /.vol.