MacBinary
                                          by
                                  Gregory J. Smith

Some methods of downloading MacBinary files to the Macintosh do not translate the MacBinary format into a standard Macintosh file. FTP under early versions of NCSA Telnet is one such case. This method of downloading leaves the MacBinary information in the data fork of the resulting Macintosh file. MacBinary will translate such data files into Macintosh files. MacBinary also has an upload feature that provides the reverse process to create files that can be uploaded with NCSA Telnet. To translate a file, just select Open from the File menu. MacBinary will translate the file based on the configuration in the Settings menu.

The Settings menu controls what function MacBinary will perform. True MacBinary is used with the case of catenating the three pieces of a MacBinary file on unix into one text file prior to downloading. With some versions of xbin and macget, the resulting forks on unix are not padded out to the 128 byte blocks that the MacBinary standard specifies. Catenating the three pieces (.info, .data and .rsrc) together will not produce a correctly formatted MacBinary file. Turning off the True MacBinary setting will handle this case. Otherwise, you should leave the True MacBinary setting on. MacBinary will only create true MacBinary II files, regardless of the True MacBinary setting. The Download setting is used to translate a data file that has been downloaded. Upload tells MacBinary to translate a Macintosh file into a MacBinary data file, suitable for uploading. The Delete after Download setting will delete the input data file after successfully translating it to a Macintosh file.

MacBinary is Freeware. You may distribute this program in whatever way you like, as long as this document is included. However, commercial distribution is prohibited without prior consent of the author.

Version 1.0.1
April 19, 1989.
©1989 Gregory J. Smith