Mac <=> Windows filename transfer question.

[randomness]

I have a newly acquired external 300GB USB2/Firewire drive, formatted so that it will mount on both Macintosh and Windows computers. As a matter of fact, I've transferred files from both Windows and Macintosh machines onto the drive using both USB and Firewire. This works fine.

I also have a stack of CDs I burned on a Windows machine.

I'm sitting in front of a Mac OS 9 machine. Said machine truncates filenames longer than its 31 character limit.

I want to transfer files from the CDs to the drive without having their filenames truncated. I believe my options are to upgrade the machine to OS X, or to find another machine.

Am I mistaken?

Thanks in advance for answers.

Comments

[ashears.livejournal.com]

Haven't faced or solved that problem myself, but I believe you are correct: Find another machine or upgrade to OS X.

Good luck!

[nathanjw]

I believe you're right. The 31-character limit is a general old-MacOS limt.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

Well, it's possible that finding another computer is your easiest solution, but you might check out the shareware options: Kilometre Browser and its accompanying control panel (for the CD reading part) might just do what you want. It also might not be able to handle filesystems other than HFS+ (it doesn't say), but it seems worth a look.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

I believe my options are to upgrade the machine to OS X, or to find another machine.

Unfortunately, that's just about correct. To make matters worse, I believe Classic MacOS isn't savvy to file extensions, so that's the information you're most likely to lose.

Have you considered putting the files on a MacOS X machine, whacking together a Perl script to make the filenames manageable, and doing new CDs? Depending on just how many CDs we're talking here, that will almost certainly be less painful than the upgrade to OS X. (-:

Good luck!

[curious-jp.livejournal.com]

I can't think of a way to do this automatically so that sensible information is preserved in the file names, so:

The definition of kHFSMaxFileNameChars as 31 is a real heartbreaker here - allowing 3 characters and a period for the main extension leaves only 27 characters of play, which means the "easy" way to do this ( hash each file with a message digest algorithm ) would require something that hashes into thirteen or less bits, because it needs to be made human readable. If this wasn't necessary ( i.e. you could have high characters in the file names ) you could use SHA-1. I don't think this is a very good idea - and I can't think of any good hashes which fit this criteria!

If you can get all the files in one place, it would be possible to sequentially number them with a python script, thus -
import os;
import string;

counter = 1;

for r, d, f in os.walk( os.curdir ):
  for filename in f:
    oldname = os.path.join( r, filename );
    chunks = filename.split( os.path.extsep );
    if( len( chunks ) <> 1 ):
      newname = "%020x%s%s" % ( counter, os.path.extsep, chunks[ -1 ] );
    else:
      newname = "%020x" % ( counter );
    os.rename( os.path.join( r, filename ), os.path.join( r, newname ) );
    counter += 1;

This won't rename directories, just files.

p.s. Thanks for blowing away my tabs, lj, you meanie. :-(

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

When I multiply 27 by 6, I get 'way more than 13 bits. The other approach is to do
it out of band, so the OS isn't involved. This would entail writing a program that
directly read the Rock Ridge (or High Sierra, or whatever) file names from the
volume label on the CD, and handcrafted the filesystem entries on the hard drive.
While I am quite capable of writing such a monstrosity, I don't think it's a
reasonable solution. I have several machines that dual-boot MacOS 9 and X,
works pretty well.

[(Anonymous)]

When I multiply 27 by 6, I get 'way more than 13 bits.

Whoops! I meant to say 13-byte! Thirteen byte hash expanding to 26 bytes worth of printable hexadecimal.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

Actually, all you need to do is make sure the Finder isn't involved— the rest of OS 9 (the HFS+ drivers, for instance) is reputedly entirely happy to take 255-byte filenames. Not that I ever bothered to check, when I had an OS 9-booting Mac around, but reasonably convincing people claim (see link above) to have written non-horrendous software for that OS that handles those files.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Get the Joliet filesystem extension:

http://www.tempel.org/joliet/

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

Ooo! So you could use MPW Shell or MacPerl or some such? Cool, I hadn't thought of that.

(Embarrassingly, I don't have a classic Mac around any more for experimentation. Not since the terrifying upgrades to the iBook...)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I dealt with it by using someone else's machine. :)