I just received some family pictures (new niece) from an old Mac. They are labeled 'Macintosh binhex-encoded files'.

Can someone tell me how to convert these to jpg's I can see on Linux.

Regards,

Tom

You need the Linux "macutils" package. Google for a download
appropriate to your Linux distribution. For example, if you're running
RedHat, you probably want:
http://www.redhat.com/swr/i386/macut...2.i386_dl.html

In there, you'll find the "binhex" program. You can use that to decode the Mac binhex compressed files into whatever they really are. Binhex is just a file compression format, like PKZIP. You can probably configure your mailer to automatically run binhex to uncompress these kinds of attachments. How to do that depends on what mailer you use.

I've installed macutils on my RH9. I'm assuming they are jpeg files, but there is nothing which opens in any graphic software I have, the error in Gimp is 'unknown file type'.

Could this Mac be so old it's transferring something unique to Macs?

Regards,

Tom

It could be that it's just missing the file suffix, but the GIMP should be smarter than that. Try running file(1) on it at see what it thinks the file is. It examines the contents of the file to attempt to determine its type. If it just says "data", then you're SOL.

Another possibility is that you could be looking at the wrong branch. I don't know MacOS at all, but I recall that files have various "branches", which let you encapsulate data, resources, properties, and what-not all in one file. Binhex should let you select which branch to extract. You want the "data" branch, I'm pretty sure. I haven't had to deal with MacOS files in years, so I'm fuzzy on this.

The files are named L.jpg_1. I've assumed they're jpegs and removed the _1 as well as left it alone.

Sample output:
[tom@localhost family]$ binhex -ulq Lindsey.jpg
name="Lindsey.jpg", type=TEXT, author=MACA, data=20411, rsrc=0?

If it was recognized as a graphics file wouldn't it have some such file as a type?

I've never been on a MAC, so I've no experience with it.

GIMP comes up with an unrecognized format message.

Regards,

Tom

I haven't done much on Macs myself, but I have successfully done conversions like you're attempting. But that was years ago so my memory is vague. The only other thing I can think of is that binhex thinks that's a text file, and is converting the Mac line termination character (carriage-return) to the UNIX one (line-feed). That would mess up any binary file, and perhaps mess up a JPEG enough to make it unrecognizable. Look for a binhex option that makes it assume the file is binary.