Help finding all AppleWorks 4 files

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Level 2

465 points

Help finding all AppleWorks 4 files

Before we start installing a bunch of Lion computers in our office, I need to go on a search to locate all our old AppleWorks 4 files and convert them to something that Pages can open (ex., AppleWorks 6).

I'm wondering if there is some kind of metadata I can search on using mdfind or mdls that would identify a file as being AppleWorks 4, or whether there is a string within the file I can grep on to identify them.

I have thousands of files to do this with, so any way of automating it would be helpful.

Thanks.

G4 MDD, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Dec 3, 2011 4:32 PM

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Answer 1

Peggy

Level 8

41,865 points

Dec 3, 2011 6:34 PM in response to cpragman

There is no such thing as AppleWorks 4. AppleWorks is the name Apple gave ClarisWorks 5 when it took it back "in-house" at version 5.0.3 around 1998.

Since AppleWorks 6 was released in March, 2000, you could do a search for files with a creation date before then as a starting point. If you didn't update to AppleWorks 6 until later you could use that date.

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Answer 2

mns579

Level 4

1,170 points

Dec 4, 2011 11:07 AM in response to cpragman

I made some notes on using a Find (Cmd-F) Raw Query to locate AW/CW files here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3316823. The discussion covers using Find on the type and creator codes attached to AW/CW files, though I can't tell you how to distinguish a file created with, say, AW6, from a file created with CW4. There are likely some small differences in the first few bytes of the file header, but I haven't investigated (and don't have enough old CW files on hand) to know for certain.

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