MCVERT

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (LOCAL)
Updated: May 5, 1987
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NAME

mcvert - BinHex 4.0 to MacBinary file conversion utility

SYNOPSIS

mcvert [-options] name... [[-options] name...]...

DESCRIPTION

The mcvert program translates MacIntosh files from one format to another. The primary formats in which MacIntosh files are represented on non-Macs are:

MacBinary:: An eight bit wide representation of the data and resource forks of a Mac file and of relevant Finder information, MacBinary files are recognized as "special" by several MacIntosh terminal emulators. These emulators, using Kermit or Xmodem or any other file transfer protocol, can separate the incoming file into forks and appropriately modify the Desktop to display icons, types, creation dates, and the like.
BinHex 4.0:: A seven bit wide representation of a Mac file with CRC error checking, BinHex 4.0 files are designed for communication of Mac files over long distance, possibly noisy, seven bit wide paths.
PackIt:: PackIt files are actually representations of collections of Mac files, possibly Huffman compressed. Packing many small related files together before a MacBinary transfer or a translation to BinHex 4.0 is common practice.
Text:: A MacIntosh ends each line of a plain text file with a carriage return character (^M), rather than the newline character (^J) that some systems seem to prefer. Moreover, a MacBinary file has prepended Finder information that non-MacIntoshes don't need.
Data, Rsrc:: A Data or Rsrc file is the exact copy of the data or resource fork of a MacIntosh file.

It is the purpose of this program to convert to the MacBinary format files in other of the above formats, and vice versa.

PARAMETERS

Exactly one of the following operations may be specified for an input name:

x: BinHex 4.0 - files in the MacBinary format are translated to BinHex files, or vice versa. The name argument may be the name of a file to be converted or a basename to which an appropriate suffix must be appended to get a filename. If the conversion is from Binhex 4.0 to MacBinary, several files may comprise the BinHex representation of the Mac file. Rather than manually concatenate the files and manually delete mail headers and other extraneous garbage, one may specify the names of the files in order and mcvert will do the concatenating and deleting. Conversely, in converting a MacBinary file to BinHex 4.0 format for mailing over long distances, one may be restricted to mail messages of no greater that some fixed length. In this case, mcvert can automatically divide the BinHex file into pieces and label each piece appropriately. Option 'x' is selected by default.
r: Resource - files in the MacBinary format with empty data forks and nonempty resource forks are made from ordinary data files, or vice versa.
d: Data - files in the MacBinary format with nonempty data forks and empty resource forks are made from ordinary data files, or vice versa.
u: Text - files in the MacBinary format with nonempty data forks and empty resource forks are made from ordinary data files, or vice versa. Unix newline characters are interchanged with MacIntosh carriage return characters, and a newly created MacBinary file has creator field given by the MAC_EDITOR environment variable.

OPTIONS

p | q: If a BinHex to MacBinary conversion is taking place and option 'p' is selected, any file of type "PIT " will be unpacked into its constituent parts. This option does not recursively unpack "PIT " files packed in "PIT " files. If a MacBinary to BinHex conversion is taking place, this option is currently ignored. By default, option 'q' is selected.
U | D: When option 'U' is selected, the conversion that takes place is the one suitable for Uploading files. That is, the conversion is from MacBinary to something else when 'U' is selected. Conversely, option 'D', as in Download, converts from something to MacBinary. Option 'D' is the default.
s | v: Normally, mcvert prints to stderr information about the files it is creating. Selecting option 's', as in silent, disables this reporting. Option 'v', for verbose, is the default.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

There are four environment variables one may use to customize the behavior of mcvert slightly.

MAC_EDITOR: The creator of MacBinary text files produced with options -uD. The default is MACA, the creator type of MacWrite.
MAC_DLOAD_DIR: The MacBinary files created when option -D is selected are placed in this directory. The default is ".", the current working directory.
MAC_EXT: The MacBinary files created when option -D is selected are named according to the filename field stored in the file header, with the name extended by this suffix. The default is ".bin".
MAC_LINE_LIMIT: The BinHex files created when option -U is selected may be no longer than this many lines long. Files that would otherwise exceed this line limit are broken up into several files with numbers embedded into their file names to show their order. Each such file has "Start of part x" and "End of part x" messages included where appropriate.

BUGS

It should be possible to discard bad input now and successfully translate good input later, but bad input mostly just causes immediate termination.

A more diligent person would support BinHex 3.0 and BinHex 2.0 and BinHex 5000.0 B. C., but I've never seen anyone use them in three years. A more diligent person would also do something for users of macget and macput, but hopefully someone will make those programs support the MacBinary file protocol.

AUTHOR

Doug Moore, Cornell University Computer Science. Based upon xbin by Dave Johnson, Brown University, as modified by Guido van Rossum, and upon unpit by Allan G. Weber, as well as upon correspondence with several helpful readers of USENET.

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Time: 14:17:16 GMT, August 24, 2022