Specifying the pathname explicitly

Let's assume that one of the files used in the example is actually stored on your development system as /release/data1. If you simply put /release/data1 in the buildfile, mkifs would include the file in the image, but would call it /proc/boot/data1 on the target system, instead of /release/data1.

Sometimes this is exactly what you want. But at other times you may want to specify the exact pathname on the target (i.e. you may wish to override the prefix of /proc/boot). For example, specifying /etc/passwd would place the host filesystem's /etc/passwd file in the target's pathname space as /proc/boot/passwd — most likely not what you intended. To get around this, you could specify:

/etc/passwd = /etc/passwd

This tells mkifs that the file /etc/passwd on the host should be stored as /etc/passwd on the target.

On the other hand, you may in fact want a different source file (let's say /home/joe/embedded/passwd) to be the password file for the embedded system. In that case, you would specify:

/etc/passwd = /home/joe/embedded/passwd