[HM] Re: Extra files & docs

[Duane Murphy]

--- At Sat, 1 Mar 2003 13:47:17 -0600, Charles Turner wrote:

>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.

This is consistant. The way OS X deals with DOS foramatted disks is
different from OS 9.

>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 ._

In unix, files that begin with a . are hidden. The ._ file is probably a
folder. It probably contains the resource fork and additional
information. It could just be a file. In that case its the second file of
an AppleDouble format. (AppleDouble is a way for the Macintosh file
system to store Macintosh files on a file system that doesnt have
multiple-fork files).

>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.

Yes. .Trashes is the trash folder for the disk. .DS_Store is desktop
database information for the Finder.

>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.

Yes.

>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.

How would you have it handle it more gracefully? The Macintosh file
system requires additional meta-data (additional information about the
file) as well as needing to support a resource fork (basically a second
file) associated each file? 

The probelm stems from a change from the way OS 9 does it to the way OS X
does it. If you are in the middle switching between 9 and X then you will
see this problem. I guess the problem is that OS X ignores how OS 9 dealt
with DOS disks. That's a bug.

The worst part is that the files are not compatible. As long as you stay
away from Resource-required file formats, you'll be ok.

 ...Duane