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macOS 27 Golden Gate deprecates hdiutil in favor of diskutil image
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Apple has deprecated the hdiutil command-line tool in macOS 27 Golden Gate, directing engineers to use diskutil image for disk image operations instead.
Any build pipeline, backup script, or installer workflow that shells out to hdiutil will need to migrate to diskutil image, and the replacement is not yet a drop-in equivalent. Several hdiutil options are missing, verbose logging is poorer, and diskutil image fails silently on root-owned files that hdiutil handled via an authentication prompt. The change also introduces behavioral differences such as scrubbing the Trash folder by default, which can alter the contents of generated images.
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The man page for hdiutil on the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta states the tool is deprecated and lists diskutil image as the replacement for all disk image operations.
diskutil image is missing several hdiutil options including -puppetstrings and multiple -srcfolder flags, and it lacks an authentication prompt for root-owned files, causing silent failures.
In a backup comparison, diskutil image was over a minute faster and produced a smaller image, but it omitted the Trash folder and provided less verbose output than hdiutil.
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