the catalog database keeps track of three mappings: CNID -> dev/ino and did/name dev/ino -> CNID did/name -> CNID dev/ino is used to keep track of magically moved files. did/name is for quick lookups of CNIDs. NOTE: the database will append a nul byte to the end of name. in addition, name should be given as it appears on disk. this allows the creation of cnid updating/cleaning programs that don't have to deal with knowing what the particular codepage is. here's the ritual: 1) open a volume. call cnid_open. 2) every time you need a CNID, call cnid_add(). it will automatically look for an existing cnid and add a new one if one isn't already there. you can pass a hint if you want. the only use this has right now is to enable consistency between AFP and HFS. in the future, it would allow people to write conversion utilities that pre-instantiate a database without needing to re-assign CNIDs. 3) if you want to just look for a CNID without automatically adding one in, you have two choices: a) cnid_resolve takes a CNID, returns name, and over-writes the CNID given with the parent DID. this is good for FPResolveID. b) cnid_lookup returns a CNID corresponding to the dev/ino,did/name keys. it will auto-update the catalog database if there's a discrepancy. NOTE: cnid_add calls this before adding a new CNID. 4) when you delete a file or directory, you need to call cnid_delete with the CNID for that file/directory. 5) if you're just moving a CNID, call cnid_move with the CNID and the new dev/ino,did/name pairs. 6) call cnid_close when closing the volume.