[HM] Re: Extra files & docs

[Charles Turner]

On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 07:08  AM, Home Macintosh Users List 
wrote:

> From: "Duane Murphy" <duanemurphy at mac.com>
> Subject: [HM] Re: Extra files & docs
> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 18:27:34 -0800
>
> --- At Mon, 24 Feb 2003 09:13:46 -0500, Nancy J. Ayers wrote:
>
>> Having just upgraded my Wallstreet to OS X, I'm puzzled by all the
>> occurrences of docs, in and out of folders, called "FINDER.DAT,"
>> "Icon," and "RESOURCE.FRK."

Is that "Wallstreet" machine old enough that its HD was formatted HFS 
(Mac OS standard) but not the newer HFS+ (Mac OS extended). When did 
HFS+ first come out? Was is OS8.5?

> Can you expand on this information? Where are you seeing these files?
> Quite honestly, you _should_not_ be seeing any of these files.

I encountered a similar thing (the same thing?) when sharing an MS-DOS 
format Zip disk with my Linux PC at the office. On that disk the Linux 
system would show RESOURCE.FRK, etc. which are not shown by the Mac OS9 
Finder. Later when I installed Jaguar on my Mac, I started seeing the 
same things when working with a MS-DOS formatted Zip disk, presumably 
due to the unix heritage of OS-X.

As an experiment I took an MS-DOS formatted Zip disk, put some files on 
it while running OSX, then rebooted into OS9, looked at the Zip disk 
and put some files on it from that boot-up. Now one set of unexpected 
files are seen under an OSX boot-up, and a different set of unexpected 
files are seen under an OS9 boot-up.

For example for some files and folders that I had created on the Zip 
disk while running under Jaguar, when running under the OS9 boot-up are 
seen as pairs of files:

Vemmy1.PSD and ._Vemmy1.PSD, etc.

I have no idea what the files are that the OS9 Finder shows that start 
with ._

Maybe this is the way OSX saves file attributes when the file resides 
on a non HFS (ie. non native Mac formatted) media. Under OS9 I also saw 
.Trashes and .DS_Store on the Zip disk.

My spin on this situation is that (1) it is an artifact of using PC 
formatted media on the Mac, (2) our ordinary files are seen with our 
ordinary file names (not starting with a 'dot'), and (3) this is 
nothing to worry about except for the inconvenience of sorting through 
the clutter of the extraneous file names.

I'm reformatting my MS-DOS format Zip disks to Mac format as I 
encounter them. I'll save a few in MS-DOS format for the rare occasion 
that I share files that way with a non-Mac system. However, I'm 
disappointed that Jaguar doesn't handle this situation more gracefully. 
So far searching the Apple knowledge base and also using Google I 
haven't found any thorough discussion of this, which is surprising.

-ct