Old files are now Unix Executable
This was last discussed 13 years ago with no resolution I can find. It must be related to O/S update some time back. Is there a fix?
MacBook Pro 15", OS X 10.11
What extension do these files have?
Question marked as
Files from OS 9 and earlier (in particular) were tracked by the Type and Creator codes in their resource fork data so the OS would know, more than anything else, what app it belonged to.
These were deprecated all the way back in Snow Leopard. macOS stopped paying attention to them entirely starting a few versions back and now uses a combination of file extensions and Uniform Type Identifiers. What you're looking at is the OS' way of saying, "I have no idea what this is."
If you know what app they're from, you can add the appropriate file extension. For Microsoft Word, it would be .doc .
The real problem is finding any app that will show you those codes. File Buddy is one, but I'm not sure if it has a demo mode. If you can use it (at least for a few days), this is what you want to find out. In this example, I did a Get Info on an old PDF file.
Type and Creator codes always have four characters each. CARO indicates Adobe Acrobat created the file. Type is PDF(space).
This is what you want to know on all of these old files in order to help figure out what they are. Such as, any file with a creator of 8*** is Photoshop. ART5 is Illustrator.
20 replies
Sorry Kurt, I have gone through my files and I am unable to find any more that need to be converted. I appreciate your help.
Hi VikingOSX,
Did a build and then run where it asked to select a file. I selected the same TIFF (file has no extension). It returned this:
Just to see if it would behave differently as a compiled app, I tried to export one, but I then get this error message:
Changed mine to repeat so you can do as many as a row as you want instead of only being able to do one and then relaunch the app for the next file.
repeat -- forever
set selectedFile to (choose file)
tell application "Finder"
set fType to the file type of selectedFile
set cType to the creator type of selectedFile
end tell
display dialog "Creator: " & cType & return & "Type: " & fType with title "" & selectedFile
end repeat
Thank you Kurt, for all of your help. On a hunch I tried adding .doc to the files, and there they were wide open as they should be. Problem solved for this time. I am going to keep your suggestions to try if I run into more old files.
I also want to thank all of those who responded with suggestions to fix the problem. I really did not expect to get any response when I posted my question.
Old files are now Unix Executable