commandliners

A file with the extension .dmg uses a proprietary disk image format commonly found on Mac OS X (well, usually: you can use any extension anywhere, obviously) .

The command used for manipulating disk images is hdiutil

$ hdiutil attach nmap-5.00.dmg
esperado   CRC32 $C955C266
/dev/disk2              Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk2s1            Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2            Apple_HFS                       /Volumes/nmap-5.00

This command will attach a disk image to the system as a device. attach will return information about an already-attached image if it had already attached it. mount is a synonym for attach.

$ hdiutil detach /Volumes/nmap-5.00/
"disk2" unmounted.
"disk2" ejected.

The above command will detach a disk image and terminate any associated hdid process. eject is a synonym for detach.

There are useful encryption options which we shall speak of in a forthcoming post.