fixin 0s nine

March 13, 2005 7:58 PM

My PC died and so I took all my CD saved files to place on my Mac. Here's the rub, many of the files (esp. media files) now have truncated and extremely garbled names. Mac OS9 has a 31 character limit, while PCs have a lot more. Is there any tricky way to increase the size of filenames on OS9? Its hundreds of files, so renaming them is out of the question.
posted by fucker to Technology (7 answers total)

In a word, No. Well, there's upgrading to OS X, but, other than that, no.
posted by boaz at 8:03 PM on March 13, 2005

Yes, and not tricky.
posted by AlexReynolds at 8:07 PM on March 13, 2005

I stand corrected. Neato.
posted by boaz at 8:35 PM on March 13, 2005

Hmmmm...yes and no. OS X is the real solution. (How old is your machine?)

The way I read this, the extension will let you read the > 31 character Windows file names on the CD fine. I remember it fondly.

But when you try to copy those files to the Mac OS9 hard drive, I believe that the extra characters will still get chopped off. (Can't test it myself, no OS 9 machine any more.)
posted by omnidrew at 11:27 PM on March 13, 2005

The Mac OS 9 Finder does not support file names greater than 31 characters in length. Notice the second bullet in AlexReynolds' link says

"You can now optionally preserve the original names, even if they're longer than 31 chars, provided you want to use them with Mac OS X or other Mac OS 9 tools that support long names (such as Kilometre Browser and ZipIt)"

Unfortunately, the Finder in Mac OS 9 is not one of those tools. Renaming seems to be your only workable option if you want to see them nicely in the OS 9 Finder.

Upgrading to OS X would be the preferred choice.
posted by pmbuko at 11:39 PM on March 13, 2005

Here's a list of renaming utilities for OS 9.
posted by bitpart at 9:31 AM on March 14, 2005

The idea being to use the renaming software to truncate the filenames, if they allow that.
posted by bitpart at 9:37 AM on March 14, 2005