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From: rnf@shumv1.uucp (Rick Fincher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Matt D. / MAC FST
Message-ID: <1990Feb3.175459.11564@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 3 Feb 90 17:54:59 GMT
References: <9001311847.AA29777@apple.com> <12775@fs2.NISC.SRI.COM>
Reply-To: rnf@shumv1.ncsu.edu (Rick Fincher)
Organization: NCSU Computing Center
Lines: 26

In article <12775@fs2.NISC.SRI.COM> cwilson@NISC.SRI.COM (Chan Wilson) writes:
>In article <9001311847.AA29777@apple.com> NOSES@DBNINF5.BITNET (Achim Patzner) writes:
>[...hfs fst...]
>>volumes to GS/OS volumes... The same thing could be done by writing a
>>program like the Mac's AFE utility as GS/OS is able to read those volumes at
>>the block level. All that would have to be done was reading some Mac manuals
>>about the structure of a Mac volume and writing a short utility that does the
>>transfer. That doesn't sound too difficult to me. (No, *I* won't do it;
> 	   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Hah hah hee hee...  
>
>I have yet to figure out whether the creators of HFS were insane or brilliant.
>'B-Trees', for god's sake.  Try deciphering one of those.  You can't even
>tell what files are hidden in subdirectories, because you can't even
>_find_ the subdirectory to start with.  And I haven't found any technotes
>that deal with this topic... (hey Cary, remember this topic? )
>

Inside Macintosh vol 4 and 5 have a detailed discussion of the HFS B-Trees.
Trees are used because of their efficiency in terms of searching.  They are
nothing exotic, they've been used in Computer Science for a while.  They
just take a little studying.


Rick Fincher
rnf@shumv1.ncsu.edu