[HM] HELP: OSX File Format Fiasco

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 06:08 Canada/Eastern, MUG NEWS wrote:

> Bringing files from my classroom of OS X flat panel Macs,
> and arriving back at my office with OS/9 machine, all
> the stuffit files (.sit) and all graphics files (.gif, .jpg)
> have been duplicated into TWO files, one named the same
> with underscore in front of the name.

This is not a bug. You transferred your files using a non-Mac OS medium 
or network. (Incidentally, I'm willing to bet you don't have an OS/9 
machine in your office, but an Mac running Mac OS 9. OS/9 is an 
operating system developed by Microware and it is a completely 
different kettle of fish from the Mac OS; it has been ported to the 
PowerPC, but I seriously doubt that's what you're talking about.)

Traditionally, Mac files have a dichotomous structure: they are made up 
by a data fork and a resource fork. Other operating systems are 
completely confused by this structure and either see only the data fork 
or mangle the file. One method of dealing with this is the AppleDouble 
encoding, the results of which you describe: the data fork is the 
larger file, the one beginning with "._" is the resource fork (and it 
is invisible for the regular user on Windows machines).

Solution: Transfer your files to your machine using an HFS or HFS+ disk 
or with a network method that preserves Mac file structures.

> under OSX the Mac can't even
> recognize or open its own files.

Nonsense.

f