We shipped hfsutils-1.10b-1 on the mklinux DR1 CDROM, and it has been used by a lot of people in order to copy various tar files from their CDROM/harddrive over from the Mac world into the world of Unix and MkLinux. Much kudos to Rob for this work!
We've had just one person (to my knowledge) reporting a corrupted MacOS partition when using hcopy to the MacOS disk, although he said that Norton recovered the disk fine. I've asked him to try and post details to Rob. Is it possible that, on an already corrupted disk, hcopy corrupts things more dramatically?
I've used it a lot to install large binary files in my MacOS system folder (our microkernel currently lives on the MacOS partition) and never had a problem thus far.
Unfortunately we didn't get tcl/tk together until after the CDROM was cut but we were also able to demo xhfs at the WWDC conference, copying files to and from the Mac's disk and copying from a Mac CDROM. This went down very well with the public.
A couple of ideas:
I have felt limited by the lack of command line options to hdir. Would it be possible to reuse the exoskeleton of 'ls' but change the internals to access the hfs directories? This would be much more powerful for shellscripts. Just because mdir is broken doesn't mean that hdir should be! I have ended up doing the below several times:
hdir | awk '{print $9}' | while read i ; do OPERATION; done
I realise that the wildcarding will help a lot for the hcopies, but if I want to hcopy AND, for example, extract each tar archive, then I'm still limited with only wildcarding.
Oh, and it'd be more complete if the hfstools could read CDROMs which have a 'soft' block size other than that of 512 bytes, such as the System 7 install CDROMs which have a 2K blocksize. Don't worry, it's not very urgent - MkLinux can't read their partition tables either just yet :)
Just some thoughts. Keep up the good work!
[ Nick ] -- Nick Stephen Web: http://www.gr.osf.org/~stephen OSF Research Institute Email: stephen@gr.osf.org 2, Avenue de Vignate Phone: +33 76 63 48 72 38610 Gieres - France Fax: +33 76 51 05 32