the extention .exe cannot be run under osx?

Usually it means it's a Window's file, but sometimes some of the compressed files with that extension can be opened using some of the third-party programs.

But this is also what makes some of the viruses hard to spread to the Mac when they come as a .exe file.

 

.exe means a windows program, so 99% of the time you can't open it, just like you cant open a .app file on a PC

 

If it's compressed, the standard is generally Stuffit by Aladdin Systems. They have a free version and a pay version.

You can also use .exe files by purchasing VirtualPC, which lets you run a Windows enviroment on your Mac, albeit very very slowly... It still comes in handy for occasional stuff, like email attachments.

Very rarely are those .exe attachments worth viewing anyway tho Once you've seen elf bowling once, you've seen it a thousand times...

pnw

 

yeah, generally a .exe cannot be opened on a Mac. .exe is the Windows equivalent of a .app which can only be opened on a macintosh.

 

Thank God! That's why I switched.

 

hahaha! EXACTLY! I've yet to see one that was worth keeping...and I'm personally GLAD that the Mac OS can't run them. They're the #1 Time-Waster in offices everywhere...besides Windows itself, of course!

 

unix doesn't identify files by the extension. it uses something inside the file called a magic number.

(individual apps, however, may rely on the extension)

so -- an .exe that doesn't work on unix has problems because it has a missing or malformed magic number (being a PC-only file would cause that), not because of the extension.

as humans, we recognize the .exe extension and associate it w/ windows. but unix doesn't care.

 

exact => 5/5
great summary ;-)

 

and that, my friends, is one of the hundreds of reasons why OSX + all other Unix OS's are far superior than all things Windoze.

 

thank you

 

hey! a friend sent me her link a couple months ago. i forwarded it and, pretty soon, they stopped offering mp3 samples.

have you actually gone on and bought CDs?

 

You can't open .zip files on a Mac, right? I've never even tried.

 

Sure you can, I've unzipped plenty of files on my Mac. They almost always contain pics that Windoze users send me though.

All you need is Stuff It. It's just like unstuffing a .sit file.

 

There are rare occasions when .exe files can be run... the Folding@home core is an .exe file for example. Just has to be run in the Terminal.

 

hahaha! you ROCk, mrjamin. Thanks to you and MacRumors, Wing got more hits than it could handle.

zimv20, someone I sent the link to weeks ago bought one of her cd's and made me a cassette tape of it. It's WONDERFUL!

 

sweet. i love this quote from her homepage:

 

Close.

Yes, it's true that Windows and DOS uses file extensions to determine whether something is executable or not. UNIX, however, uses permissions -- if something has the executable set and you try to execute it, the kernel will attempt to execute it.

How the file gets executed, however, is similar on Windows/DOS to the way its done on UNIX.

DOS will look at the first couple of bits of the file to determine how the file gets executed. Take a look at an .EXE file and you'll notice that the first two bytes are "MZ". There are similar bytes for .COM files. There are other bytes that will further determine what kind of .EXE file it is, how it uses memory, etc.

UNIX also looks at the first few byes, as well as a few others. UNIX is a bit more comprehensive, however, in its methods. There's a file called /etc/magic that UNIX uses to determine what type of file it is (it can even recognize, though not execute, DOS binaries.)

The "magic number" just identifies the type of file and how it gets executed (if at all.) Whether it gets executed or not depends on the extension (in DOS and Windows), or on the executable bit (in UNIX.)

 

afaik, if you're typing the name of the file, you need to chmod it to be executable. try it.

 

Yep, you're right. The "#!" at the beginning is typically called a "shebang" and happens to be the "magic number".

A shell script still needs to have execute permission, as does the interpreter itself. The only exception is for a script that gets sourced in by another script (a good example is a typical .profile file.) These scripts do not need to have the execute bit set, as they are only read in by the sourcing script (with commands executed under that script's context.)