🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4338@hub.UUCP> jsimon@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes:
>-Message-Text-Follows-
>And I'd like also to ask people to freely use spaces when naming files that
>are stuffed or binhexed.  Spaces make file names much much easier to read,
>and the Mac lets you use them, so their use should be encouraged, not the
>other way around.  I don't want to be restricted by unenlightened operating
>systems.

Well, the whole point of Binhex is to get files through "unenlightened"
transmission media, and stuffit puts all its info in the data fork so the
Unbinhexed files may be stored on filesystem without resource forks (one loses
the creator and type, if it is not stored in Macbinary, but this may be 
fixed with resedit).

Now, operating systems may have file systems that limit filenames to 15 or
8 characters, may not be case sensitive, (as the mac isn't but Unix is), 
may not preserve case (as DOS and VMS don't).  The usual mapping of long to
short filenames is to truncate or garble the last characters, thus eliminating
the .sit, .bin, or .hqx extension.

Now, many of our shareware files are distributed via billboards which are
administrated part time, and provided at the expense of the administrator,
who has to put the files on his disk using whatever OS he has.

Many of us download files of the Internet via ftp and un-binhex them on
Unix systems, as it is more convenient to use shell scripts for this, and
minimize the amount of stuff that has to be left lying around on the Mac
disk in the process.

If our objective is the free transmission of files through foreign transmission
media, then we should be considerate and use short, all-one-case filenames,
without spaces, without '.' extensions more than three letters, and without
characters that are metacharacters in any common shell.

The names of the files withing a Stuffit archive may be anything appropriate
to a Mac; we would not expect files to be unstuffed on Unix (or would we?).
-- 
Michael D. Crawford
Oddball Enterprises
694 Nobel Drive
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
oddball!mike@ucscc.ucsc.edu

Consulting for Apple Computer Inc.
escher@apple.com

The opinions expressed here are solely my own.