How do I open a unix executable file?

If you're talking about the stuffed cabbage recipe the OP has given users here a link to, you most certainly did not "easily" open it in TextEdit. Well, sure. I can open it. But does a screen full of binary data make any sense to you?

A unix executable is a binary file. Those old Word files were saved in a binary format, hence, the are interpreted as such. Give their age not even today's Word can open them directly. But you should open Word and try to open the file from Word's File menu rather than trying to double-click on the file.

You might also try using the freeware, Open Office, to open the file in the same manner as above.

It may be showing up as a UNIX executable because there is no associated application. You can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice to be able to read MS Word files.

OS X is classifying the files as programmes because they have the executable permission set on them, which is probably due to them being copied from a volume that doesn't support POSIX file system permissions.

To remove the executable permission from all of the Word documents on your Mac, do the following:

1. Open Terminal.
2. Enter "

   mdfind -0 'kMDItemContentType = "com.microsoft.word.doc"' | xargs -0 chmod -x

   ".

You can safely ignore that error.

Please try the following:

1. Open Terminal.
2. Type "

   file

   " (including the space).
3. Drop one of the files onto the window.
4. Focus the window and then press return.
5. Include the output in a reply to this post.

DebSaks wrote:

I am assuming I should continue to exclude the quotation marks.

Yes.

What do you mean by "focus the window"? I will definitely post the reply as soon as I'm in focus. 😉

I simply meant that you must click on the window so that it'll receive your input. 🙂

That output indicates the file is either not a Word document or is corrupted. Is it possible the files were created by a different application?

Wow, the files are that old?! In that case, you're probably unable to open them because they're in an obsolete format. It'd probably be possible to convert them to a modern format, but I'm afraid I don't know how to do that.

If you are wiling to share one of these files via Dropbox, I have a few old Macs floating around that I can use to figure out what files these are, if they are not corrupted during the copying process.

Have you tried OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

If you can see the dates on these files, you can also try looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_word_processors to see what could have been used.

Do you recall the source machine from where these came? You have mentioned Classic II and SE 30.