Application now a Unix executable?

[miloblithe]

OK. I just copied an old application (Civ 2) off of my parents iMac and transfered to my iBook by way of a Lexar jump drive, which I have mainly been using to transfer PDFs and such to/from my work computer (a PC) and my home computer (an eMac). I never formatted the jump drive because when I first stuck it into work computer (PC) it worked fine. I then stuck it into my home computer and I could copy the PDFs to and from the drive fine. Anyway. The copy of Civ 2 I just made now shows up as a Unix executable instead of a classic application. I assume that something is screwy in how the jump drive was formatted for PCs by default(?), and things have gotten confused between the three operating systems: Windows XP on my work computer, OS X on my computers and OS 8.6 on my parents computer.

The important question is: how can i convince my computer that this is in fact a classic application, not a Unix executable, and start playing some Civ 2?

 

[jsw]

Might be easier to archive the Civ2 folder, copy that, and expand it on your Mac.

Edit: side note: Mac apps are often actually folders, so maybe that's the problem. However, Civ III shows up as a single executable on my system, so I'm betting the archive/unarchive option will work best.

 

[miloblithe]

I should have mentioned this. I'm already home, and the iMac that I was copying these things from is at my parents house. I was hoping I could fix these "Unix" files that I have here as I'm unlikely to return to my parents house any time soon.

 

[jsw]

OS 9 stuff is out of my league, but my guess is that you ended up missing one of the file forks when copying to the drive, so that, even though your Mac knows it's marked as an executable, it doesn't know how to open it because it doesn't have everything. I'd be perfectly willing to defer to the opinion of someone more knowledgeable in this area.

Any chance of your parents archiving the folder and sending it to you?

 

[Marble]

Yeah, I think the problem here is that the Windows filesystem doesn't recognize resource forks and will discard them. An archive should work, like the other poster says.