MacOS – How to salvage macos resource forks when copying from a non hybrid ISO 9660 Rockridge CD

macosrecoveryresources

I have a set of ten years old archive CD-ROMs burnt on a OS9 Mac system by (potentially) choosing wrong options by a colleague. If mounted on the desktop of a recent MacOSX System (eg. 10.5.8 to 10.7) typically files with data in the resource fork (font files, aliases, text clippings, icon files) are displayed as empty files in the finder. Fortunately the data seems not to be lost finally (see the results below). I could retrieve the resource forks separated as files with the prefix "._".

Is there any known method to recombine/restore those separated hidden resource forks automatically with the main data to regular old style" macintosh files for a whole disk?

My results:

Copying the files back to disk with the finder via drag & drop does not solve the problem.

Copying the files via terminal with the "cp -r [source] [destination]" option has neither a success.

Using the alternative "cpmac" command instead of "cp2 has also no positive result.

Now if I use the "cp -r -p [source] [destination]" option, I get errors with some permission issues, but I find files with the same basenames but a prefix of "._" on the destination disk. These files seem to contain regular font file resource fork data.

The logged errors were for each file:
cp [sourcefilepathwithprefix] : could not copy extended attributes to [destinationfilepathwithprefix]
where prefix is "._"&[filename]

Annother minor issue is that the filenames contain "German umlauts" that were replaced with underscores. I cannot figure out if there is any retrievable information there to restore the original encoding.

I seems that the originally intended session containing the relevant hybrid mapping (HFS filesystem) for Apple Extensions was either lost or is now unreadable.

Best Answer

If the resource forks are available under the names you're describing, here's a way to recombine them:

cp -a /source/filename /destination/filename
dd if=/source/._filename of=/destination/filename/..namedfork/rsrc

This will still not copy over the type/creator and other Finder metadata, but it will copy over the resource fork.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Time Machine not detecting changes in certain folders

What actually helped was to identify the folder inside which no file changes were detected, and then rename that folder and force a backup. Then all new content inside it got added to the old backup. After that, I renamed the folder back to its original name, added another file inside and did another backup - again, the new file got backed up.

So, somehow, that folder got stuck, and by renaming it, I could reset the backup for it.

Still, I will keep an eye out for other folders that may not get backed up, using the tmutil compare command regularly.

You just can't trust Time Machine.

That's why I also use CrashPlan as a secondary, and offline, backup.

MacOS – Applescript – how can I select all non-folders in an expanded list view window

If all folders are expended in the list view , here are two solutions.

First solution:

This AppleScript

my deselectAllFolders()

on deselectAllFolders()
    script o
        property sel : {}
    end script
    tell application "Finder"
        set o's sel to selection as alias list
        set tc to count o's sel
        repeat with i from 1 to tc
            if class of item (item i of o's sel) is folder then set item i of o's sel to missing value
        end repeat
        set selection to aliases of o's sel -- select all items without folders
    end tell
    return "" -- to not put all files into the result (it's very slow to show an huge list in the editor )
end deselectAllFolders

Cons:

All items must be selected before executing the script.
Slow on huge list of items.

Second solution:

This AppleScript

set pScript to "from Foundation import NSFileManager, NSURL, NSDirectoryEnumerationSkipsHiddenFiles, NSURLIsDirectoryKey, NSURLIsPackageKey; from ScriptingBridge import SBApplication
def procFolder(fold):
    p = df.contentsOfDirectoryAtURL_includingPropertiesForKeys_options_error_(fold, [NSURLIsDirectoryKey, NSURLIsPackageKey], NSDirectoryEnumerationSkipsHiddenFiles, None)[0]
    for f in p:
           r=f.getResourceValue_forKey_error_(None, NSURLIsPackageKey, None)
           if r[0] and r[1]:
               allFiles.append(f)
           else:
               r=f.getResourceValue_forKey_error_(None, NSURLIsDirectoryKey, None)
               if r[0] and r[1]:
                     procFolder(f)
               else:
                     allFiles.append(f) 

allFiles = []
df=NSFileManager.defaultManager() 
finderApp = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_(\"com.apple.finder\")
tPath = finderApp.FinderWindows()[0].target().get()
procFolder(NSURL.URLWithString_(tPath.URL()))
finderApp.setSelection_(allFiles)"

do shell script "/usr/bin/python -c " & quoted form of pScript

No need to select all the items in the list view.
Fast (1.5 second on 8500 items)

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