Go Home | Go Back to Tips Page A Macintosh file consists of two parts, data fork and resource fork. This is very different from the Windows and UNIX files. If the Macintosh files are transmitted as ordinary UNIX or Windows files, they will corrupt because only data fork get transmitted, they can hardly be used on the other side of transmission. To make the Mac files survive the UNIX and Windows host during the transmission, some encoding and decoding are necessary. But first, to transfer a file through the network, it should be compressed to reduce the size, therefore, the bandwidth requirement. There are several utilities to compress the Macintosh files. The most famous are Drop Stuff from Aladdin, Compact Pro, and ZipIt. Compact Pro and ZipIt act similar to the WinZip for the Windows Platform, they are actually archiving tools; on the other hand, the Drop Stuff is more simpler, just a compression tool. I personally prefer the Compact Pro, but ZipIt uses the cross platform zip format, and can form larger segments than Compact Pro (Compact Pro can only handle segments as large as 32 MB). To use Drop Stuff, you simply drop your Mac file or folder onto the Drop Stuff icon, you will get the compressed file, suffix is .sit. To decompress the sit file, drop the file over the StuffIt expander icon. To get Drop Stuff and StuffIt Expander, visit http://www.aladdinsys.com. Compact Pro and ZipIt are famous shareware, they are available on many shareware download site. Run a search on google.com you will find them. To compress and decompress using ZipIt or Compact Pro, make a new archive, add the files and folders as you using WinZip in Windows. They are rather similar. After compress the files, you get the compressed Mac file. To transmit it safely on the Internet, you need to wrap it to endure the Windows and UNIX hosts on the Internet. If you are using ZipIt, you are done, because the zip file has already been wrapped in a Internet-safe form. However, to transmit the Compact Pro or StuffIt files, you need some extra steps. One method of wrapping is using a text-encoding method called BinHex. It wraps the Macintosh files into a single text file, therefore it is safe even on some legacy text-only systems. However, since it uses text-encoding, it enlarges the size of the file. It sacrifices the size for the safety. Actually, the 7-bit only systems are rare in todayıs Internet. Sometimes it is not wise to enlarge the file unnecessarily. Another encoding scheme, called MacBinary, wrapped the Macintosh files into a single file, but in binary form. By this way, it would not increase the size of the transmitting file. The Drop Stuff and Compact Pro provide one or both of the wrapping method. Actually, it is better just leave them unwrapped (encoded). When using Fetch (a Macintosh FTP client), it gives you the option to wrap the file in either BinHex or MacBinary format. The suffix for BinHex is hqx, for MacBinary is bin. |