Hierarchical File System

The Hierarchical File System (English Hierarchical File System) is a file system that was developed by Apple for Mac OS. Other operating systems such as Linux and BeOS, have read and write support for HFS. Although it was originally designed for floppy and hard disks, you can also find it on read-only media such as CD -ROMs. HFS is a proprietary format. But since it is very well documented, there is in most modern operating systems solutions to access HFS -formatted media.

History

HFS was introduced in January 1986 as a new file system for Apple Macintosh computers. It replaced the Macintosh File System ( MFS), which is a "flat file system" (one without subdirectories ) was, which was used by the earliest Macs.

In 1998, Apple HFS before to tackle inefficient allocation of space in HFS and add other improvements. HFS is still fully supported by versions of the Mac OS X to 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard in the write support has been removed. However, since Mac OS X you can not boot from an HFS volume already, since the maximum number of files ( 65,536 ) is not sufficient on an HFS volume.

Details

HFS support filenames up to a length of 31 characters, Mac-specific metadata as well as dual -fork files. When dual -fork - process the file itself ( data fork ) is supplemented by additional information (resource fork ), eg Icons. Both file parts - can be read and written, this is the "data fork" mostly sequentially, the " resource fork ", however, used as a database - each separately for itself. The distribution is invisible to the end user but accessible to the programmer.