Re: Folders Show Twice from Mac
- From: William Smith <mecklists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:59:24 -0500
In article <462210AC-0AC7-498F-A605-CE41D1C43A92@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Charlie <baboon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just replaced a Windows 2000 file server with Windows 2003. There are some
folders on this server that have dots (.) in the names. When using SMB to
access these from Mac clients, any of these folders may show up twice, once
with a lower case letter at the beginning of the folder name and once with an
upper case letter. (I would never use dots in folder names, but that's
beside the point.)
Can anyone explain why this would happen and if there is a fix (other than
renaming the folders with something reasonable)?
I am not certain that these folders showed up the same way before the
upgrade from Windows 2000. Also, the behavior is not consistent it seems;
not every folder that has a dot in the name shows up twice and apparently the
problem can disappear and reappear.
Hi Charlie!
The short story is that these secondary "._" files are Mac file resource
forks. You really shouldn't be seeing them for folders but just for
files.
The long story...
Mac OS 9 and earlier systems used a file format that combined data forks
and resource forks into one file. The data forks stored the data of the
file itself such as the text of a text document. The resource forks
contained the meta-data of the file such as a custom icon and the file
type of the file itself. Windows relies on file name extensions such as
..doc, .xls, etc., to identify the appropriate application for opening a
document. Mac OS 9 and earlier relied on the resource fork to provide
this data.
Why do you see this on Mac OS X? Because most Mac applications still
create the two-fork files but the Mac's SMB implementation for
connecting to Windows doesn't. Therefore, Apple is pre-splitting the
data and resource forks of the files before copying them to your Windows
server. The data is stored in "filename" and the resource is stored in
"._filename".
Should you delete them or leave them alone? If you delete these files
then you're not destroying the data. You're only deleting the meta-data.
That mean files without a file name extension may appear as generic
documents or UNIX-looking files. The original application can still open
the "filename" files using the File --> Open command. But when you save
again or copy the file to the server then the "._filename" file will
reappear.
Mac OS X users connecting via SMB to a Windows server won't see these
files. Windows users who have enabled the "show hidden files" option
will see these files. Otherwise, they're hidden.
What can you do to stop these from annoying your Windows folks? A few
options exist. You can use Dave from <http://www.thursby.com>, which is
a better SMB client than that built into Mac OS X. Or you can use a
shareware application called BlueHarvest from
<http://zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/>. I recommend Dave because it
handles the resource forks differently rather than deleting them
altogether. It's not free but it's an excellent product for many other
reasons. You can download trial versions of both products to evaluate
them yourself.
Hope this helps! bill
--
William M. Smith
(Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows)
.
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