Managing Disks and Volumes

You can get all of the functionality available in Disk Utility with two commands accessible from the command-line interface. The first is hdiutil, which handles disk image management. The second is diskutil, which handles the rest of the Disk Utility functionality. You can read man pages to learn how to use the different features, or you can enter either command at the command line to read text describing the different options you can use.

You can use the command-line utilities df and du to determine free space and space utilization on a volume. The utility tar can create archives, but note that tar does not preserve resource forks.