Downloading Mac Stuff in Linux?

[Gerald Combs]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> On Monday 20 September 2004 02:18 pm, webgiant at juno.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>Every time I've copied a Mac file onto a PC floppy, there's extra files
>>which aren't mentioned in the Mac directory listing.  If I just get the
>>torrent file and start downloading, will the torrent file create the extra
>>files, or will the resulting file be unreadable by Macs?
> 
> 
> Older Mac files have a "forked" structure, which looks to DOS like two files, 
> a "header" file and a "body" file.  There are formats such as Stuffit Self 
> Expanding files (usually .sea) that allow a non-Mac system to handle Mac 
> files, that's the best method for transferring them.  It's possible to create 
> Mac FS support on a Linux box, but compressed archives offer additional 
> protection against transmission error.

There were actually three parts to a file: the data fork (which
contained "normal" data), the resource fork (which contained icons,
sounds, images, executable 68000 code, etc.), and the file's information
(type, creator, and version).  It was possible for either fork to be
empty, e.g. a text file typically just had the text in the data fork and
no resource information, and executables typically had only resources.

In order to transfer the files to a non-Mac system you had to bundle the
data, resource, and info up into a single byte stream.  The two popular
choices were BinHex (.hqx) files, which converted everything to text
(similar to uu- or base64-encoding) and StuffIt, which compressed
everything into a compressed binary, similar to PKZIP.

This is all from fading memory.  I haven't used a Mac on a regular basis
since early 2000 when the ancient version of Quicken on my IIsi lost
features one by one over the course of four months due to Y2K.