Does anyone know what the easiest way is to programatically create a Disk Image from a directory? The manual for hdiutil tells how to do it the old style, (using du, and hdiutil), but it says that some of it is now handled by -fs. If anyone could offer any insight, it would be greatly appreciated.

Does this help? http://www.c-command.com/dropdmg/ – JohnDevor

Hmm… Scrath that idea… I didn’t catch the “programatically”

Programaticaly: Using a program :-)

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When the hdiutil manpage says ‘-fs does some of this work now’, it just means that this:

hdid -nomount folder.dmg newfs_hfs -v myFolderImage /dev/rdisk1s2 hdiutil detach disk1

is now accomplished by passing -fs HFS+ to hdiutil create.

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Would it be possible to use AppleScript to control Disk Copy, to create a disk image?

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I don’t know about doing it ‘programmatically’. I do it with a shell script that I use as my final build phase, executed from my main project directory. I call it ‘create_dmg’ and it goes a little something like this:

#!/bin/sh

invoke this script like: create_dmg image_name “Volume Name”

it will produce image_name.dmg

if a previous copy of the image exists, remove it

rm -f build/$1.dmg

create the image. My software fits on a 5MB image

hdiutil create build/$1.dmg -size 05m -fs HFS+ -volname “$2”

mount the image and store the device name into dev_handle

dev_handle=hdid build/$1.dmg | grep Apple_HFS | perl -e '\$_=<>; /^\\/dev\\/(disk.)/; print \$1'

copy the software onto the disk

ditto -rsrcFork “build/Product” “/Volumes/$2/Product”

unmount the volume

hdiutil detach $dev_handle

compress the image

hdiutil convert build/$1.dmg -format UDZO -o build/$1.udzo.dmg

remove the uncompressed image

rm -f build/$1.dmg

move the compressed image to take its place

mv build/$1.udzo.dmg build/$1.dmg

– TravM

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Along the same lines, anybody got a convenient way, from a build script, to attach a license agreement to a disk image? I think it has something to do with resource forks, but I’m not really sure. I use DropDmg right now to attach big “THIS IS PRERELEASE SOFTWARE” warnings to all the beta stuff I release, but I’d rather do it as an automatic part of the build process.

(JeffHarrell)

You can use the DropDMG command-line tool from a build script.

–MichaelTsai

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Not sure how to do it from a script, but this page links to the UDIF SLA SDK: http://developer.apple.com/sdk/index.html

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Why oh why do you want to waste your users time by showing a license agreement that he won’t read??? So that your software seems professional?

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When your software corrupts the user’s important files and the user sues you, you can point out that the user explicitly agreed that you were not responsible for any damage.

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“Why oh why do you want to waste your users time by showing a license agreement that he won’t read???”

When you throw 36-point bright-red type on the user’s screen saying “THIS IS PRERELEASE SOFTWARE,” he reads it.

(JeffHarrell)

Perhaps a bit off topic considering the title, but does it really make a legal difference? Is showing a license agreement when you download the software better than simply putting the license agreement in a readme? And finally: is this something developers should worry about?

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License agreements aren’t just for “don’t sue us” purposes. I include a license agreement that covers the source code and where to get it.

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This is a nice script - that allows licences: http://www.objectpark.org/buildDMG.html - DiggoryLaycock

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Does anyone know how to change the volume name of a read/write disk image once it has been created?

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The same way you change the name of any volume. Mount the disk image, select the drive on your desktop, hit Enter. Unmount the image when you’re done.

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OK great, that can be AppleScripted and used with osascript, I don’t know why the simple answer didn’t come to me. Still I would prefer a command line method for changing the volume name, AppleScript is tedious.

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Err, never mind I can use diskutil to change a volume name.