OS9 to OSX

[incognegro]

are they Novell servers? i had to deal with this in the past year.

the OS X Prosoft Novell client connects to the servers differently from OS 9, and resource forks were lost. only files with 3-digit extensions were immune from this. most of the files created in OS 9 didn't have them, sadly. also loads of illegal characters made it even more fun for the users migrating to X.

http://www.prosofteng.com/support/netwar...ic_ipx.php
http://www.prosofteng.com/support/netware_x_ip.php

specifically:
http://www.prosofteng.com/support/netwar...hp?faq=111

Why do resource forks work in OS 9 but not in OS X?

In earlier versions of the Macintosh operating system (prior to Mac OS X) files were stored on a HFS+ hard disk with a resource and a data fork and each file had a file header and file tail. The Macintosh Finder presented these two separate files (data and resource fork) as a single file to the user. You did not have to have an application extension on the file to have it recognized. The file headers and file tails indicated where files started and ended and made it possible for program recognition.

Unix file systems do not support files made up of resource and data forks and Unix files do not have file headers and tails nor is file typing supported. This means that some programs will only see the data fork with no icon. The application extension tell OS X what kind of file it is.

If you create a file in either OS the other OS might have a hard time determining what to do with it.

[C(-)ris]

Having the three digit extention didn't save the resource forks, it just tells OS X what to open it in by default, same way a PC works. The problem is when you start working with something like a .eps file. Could be a Quark EPS, Photoshop EPS, Illustrator EPS, or something else entirely. OS X will let you pick one application to associate with the .eps extention. Resource forks can override the extention, so when they are there the OS knows which app created them. In the absence of the resource fork, OS X just goes for whatever the default app is for that particular file.