OS X and File Types

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burntoutjoy

Registered
Hello all,
I'm an ex-windows user (and i'm thanking my stars i decided to Switch :), and i think all my main mac questions have been answered, but for one: how does OS X handle file types and which application they are associated with? It seems to me like the particle-wave duality - one minute, it seems there's a central database of qassociations (like Windows), and the next, it seems the associations are stored in the file somewhere (maybe in the mysterious 'Resource Fork' ...oooerrr...)

The practical application is that i've just moved from Chimera to Safari, and i would like all .htm* files to open with Safari.

Thanks in advance,
Dan Brown
 
I am a windows user still, can't quite afford a mac yet but I think I know how to fix your problem.
Select a .htm file and go to the info box (apple i) then go to the open with box and choose safari and tell it to open all .htm files with safari. That should do it.
 
The duality is real.. there's still the resource forks in (files) that'll get used if it exists, but if not (like .tar.gz or .zip file, for instance), the extension is used. r4bid is right, the finder get info thing usually works, but not always..

I think the problem is that we're still very much in a transitional state between the old way (resource forks/metadata) and the new way (extensions) of identifying applications for files. It's a bit of a religious topic among the Mac-faithful about which is "better", but I believe that by the time we get to MacOS XI (or whatever it's called), resource-forks will probably get ignored and never updated.

I used to prefer the resource-fork method; it's more flexible in allowing for multiple applications that can deal with a given file type. But it's also been a compatablity issue for years (.hqx anyone?), and continues to be in MacOSX. For instance, if you try to use the Unix commands (cp, mv, tar, etc.) on an application, it will usually render it unusable, as the resource-forks get lost. Data files (like .pdf's) are less of an issue... usually..

Anyway, the upshot is that if the Finder-mind-trick (..that isn't the application you're looking for.. ;) ) doesn't work, i usually resort to FileBuddy to do mass-resource fork modifications.

Oh, and congratulations on switching. A sure sign of intelligence... :cool:
 
Okley-dokley...
I must say I much prefer the central database thing - this Resource Fork business sounds a little shady to me - I like to have all the data there where I can see it, and as you say, it gets lost when you try to use other filesystems...
Thanks for all the info, people!
 
I believe the resource forks are stored separately in files beginning with "._<filename>" so as to be hidden from unix machines (like Darwin and the OS X Finder). Of course, this means they're visible to Windows filesystems and that's really annoying! A central database is infinately more efficient in my opinion.

Kenny, what did you mean when you said that using unix commands on apps makes them useless? Are you referring to Classic apps, or OS X .app folder packages, or...?

PS Congratulations on upgrading to a Mac :p
 
Tar is famous for stripping the resource fork out of some applications, rendering them useless. I believe that this would apply primarily to Classic and Carbon apps, but could easily apply to any of them.

This, in my experience is less of a problem with data files - if they have an extension, MacOSX can figure out what to do with them anyway; the resource fork isn't strictly needed. This is highly dependent on the file/application combination, at any rate...

I believe the resource forks are stored separately in files beginning with "._" so as to be hidden from unix machines
Click to expand...

That may be, but I don't think it's the only place that the resource fork lives. It's got to still be part of the the file itself since Classic/MacOS9x doesn't understand dot-files for resources.
 
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