How to create self-expanding Internet disk images

Jan 15, '03 09:31:12AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I was watching Phil Schiller's Power of X online QuickTime presentation and saw the demo of the new self-expanding disk images by Ken Bereskin. I searched in Disk Copy how to convert an image but couldn't find it. So I emailed Ken and he answered with this excerpt from a soon to be published technote:

Internet-enabled disk images are identical to regular disk images except they have a special flag set. You create the disk image normally and then set the internet-enabled flag with the following command:
 % hdiutil internet-enable -yes|-no|-query [pathToDMG]"
Use -yes to enable the flag, -no to disable the flag, and -query to test whether the dmg file is already internet-enabled.

You can set the internet-enabled flag only for read-only disk images. Read-write disk images cannot be internet-enabled. Older IMG and SMI files also cannot be internet-enabled.

Because Disk Copy clears the internet-enabled flag after it processes a disk image, if you need to test the file before putting it online, you must make a copy of the disk image first and test the copy. You cannot retrieve a processed disk image from the Trash and then place it online, it will no longer be internet-enabled.
Don't forget to check out Ken's Weblog for more OS X tidbits.

[Editor's note: If you haven't seen them yet, these self-processing images are pretty impressive; Safari uses one to open, mount, and install itself. Ken's weblog hasn't been updated since mid-December, probably due to the holiday and that little Macworld thing last week.]

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