hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate

August 14 2026

The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:

In macOS 27.0, hdiutil is deprecated. Use diskutil image instead for all disk image operations. diskutil image provides subcommands for attach, create, resize, info, and chpass. ASIF (Apple Sparse Image Format) images are only supported by diskutil image and are not supported by hdiutil.

There’s also a DEPRECATION NOTICE at the top of the man page that lists the diskutil replacements for hdiutil subcommands.

The majority of options from hdiutil appear to be preserved in diskutil , though under different names. However, some hdiutil options are missing, for example -puppetstrings :

provide progress output that is easy for another program to parse. PERCENTAGE outputs can include the value -1 which means hdiutil is performing an operation that will take an indeterminate amount of time to complete. Any program trying to interpret hdiutil's progress should use -puppetstrings.

Also missing are some options specific to hdiutil create -srcfolder :

-[no]crossdev -[no]scrub -[no]anyowners -skipunreadable -[no]atomic -copyuid

I attempted to compare hdiutil and diskutil on Golden Gate by performing a backup of the user home folder, something I do daily on my MacBook Pro with macOS Sequoia. First:

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