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Date:      Thu, 17 Dec 1998 20:17:56 -0600
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>
Cc:        FreeBSD-questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Tools for Mac Archives 
Message-ID:  <199812180217.UAA02565@n4hhe.ampr.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>  of "Wed, 16 Dec 1998 17:36:47 PST." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812161733580.4699-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu> 

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"Jason C. Wells" writes:
> What software can I use to extract Mac archive files like *.bin, *.hqx,
> and *.sea?

I presume you want to do something with those files in *FreeBSD*?
/home/ports/emulators/macutils is a start. Whatcha gonna do with them 
once you have them is yet another question.

The easiest way to deal with them is to use a Mac. Think
http://www.alladinsys.com/ is the home of StuffIt. They have free
expanders that can deal with all the above formats. Even for Windows.

Under FreeBSD *.sea files are the hardest as they are self expanding
compressed archives. These days most *.sea files are created with
StuffIt so the data is in *.sit format with a 68k Mac executable in the
resource fork. All Mac executables are CODE resources in the resource
fork, the data *might* also be in the resource fork for *.sea files, its
in the data fork for *.sit files. The reason this is important is you
might have a *.sea file which is really a *.sit file because the
resource fork was lost in transmission (if the data is in the data
fork).

CompactPro was another popular archiver (*.cpt format). There have been
several different *.sit compression formats over the years... Anyhow it
might be practical to delete the Mac executable out of the *.sea file in
order to get to the underlying archive.

Once you have your Mac files expanded under FreeBSD be aware Mac files 
have a data fork, a resource fork, and "finder data". You might find 
your file is of zero length, but a large file in .AppleDouble/ with the 
same filename.

Microsoft appears to put all the important stuff in the data fork. But
the native Mac word processor Nisus puts pure text in the data fork with
all the formatting information stored in the resource fork. This is
pretty cool because you can throw a heavily formatted word processing
document at your C compiler if you wish (and it works). Same thing works
for HTML, one can colorize text, tab, format, paste pictures, etc, and
all that extra fluff stays in the resource fork.

Personally, I go to some effort to keep my Mac stuff on FreeBSD in hqx
format. Stuffed first with StuffIt. And once written to the disk thru
netatalk (therefore in AppleDouble format), I'm hesitant to casually
move things around.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.



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