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Contents of synthetic.conf's man page as of 10.15.2.
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SYNTHETIC.CONF(5) BSD File Formats Manual SYNTHETIC.CONF(5) | |
NAME | |
synthetic.conf | |
SYNOPSIS | |
synthetic.conf -- synthetic symbolic link and directory manifest | |
DESCRIPTION | |
synthetic.conf describes virtual symbolic links and empty directories to | |
be created at the root mount point. Because the root mount point is read- | |
only as of macOS 10.15, physical files may not be created at this loca- | |
tion. All writeable paths must reside on the data volume, which is | |
mounted at /System/Volumes/Data. | |
synthetic.conf provides a mechanism for some limited, user-controlled | |
file-creation at /. The synthetic entities described in this file are | |
synthesized by the kernel during early system boot. They are not physi- | |
cally present on the disk, but when the system is booted, they behave as | |
if they were within certain parameters. | |
synthetic.conf is intended to be used for creating mount points at / | |
(e.g. for use as NFS mount points in enterprise deployments) and symbolic | |
links (e.g. for creating a package manager root without modifying the | |
system volume). synthetic.conf is read by apfs.util(8) during early sys- | |
tem boot. | |
FORMAT | |
synthetic.conf specifies a single synthetic entity per line. Each line | |
may have one or two columns, separated by a tab character. If a line has | |
a single column, it denotes a virtual empty directory to be created at /. | |
If a line has two columns, it denotes a symbolic link at / whose link | |
target is given in the second column. | |
In either case, the first column denotes the name of the entity to be | |
created at /. | |
A line beginning with the # character indicates a comment that is not | |
parsed. | |
SYNTHETIC ENTITIES | |
Synthetic entities may not be deleted at runtime. In order to delete a | |
synthetic entity, it must be removed from synthetic.conf, and the host | |
must be rebooted. | |
New files and directories may not be created within a synthetic empty | |
directory. | |
EXAMPLES | |
# create an empty directory named "foo" at / which may be mounted over | |
foo | |
# create a symbolic link named "bar" at / which points to | |
# "System/Volumes/Data/bar", a writeable location at the root of the data volume | |
bar System/Volumes/Data/bar | |
# create a symbolic link named "baz" at / which points to "Users/me/baz" | |
baz Users/me/baz | |
FILES | |
/etc/synthetic.conf | |
SEE ALSO | |
apfs.util(8) shutdown(8) reboot(2) | |
Darwin/macOS 2 July 2019 Darwin/macOS |
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