Background: I recently embarked on a project to convert all my old FrameMaker files into formats that I can read on a modern Mac. (The Mac version of FM was discontinued long ago.) I got things set up so that I could run the trial version of FM under Windows under Parallels on a Mac; I would open each FM file, and save it as RTF and PDF.<\/p>\r\n
But before I could do that conversion, I had to find all those old FM files, which were scattered in various folders all through my home directory.<\/p>\r\n
My first attempt to find them was to search for all files with names ending in Also, there were a fair number of files with no filename extension that turned out not<\/em> to be FrameMaker files. So the only way I could tell which were which was to try to just open everything in FrameMaker, and ignore the ones that FM couldn\u2019t open.<\/p>\r\n (In the Finder under modern macOS versions, both the FM files and the relevant non-FM files appear with a \u201cKind\u201d listed as \u201cDocument.\u201d Not helpful, Finder!)<\/p>\r\n (I have vague memories of being really pleased to learn that I didn\u2019t need to use filename extensions, so I saved a lot of documents without them. If I had known at the time how much of a hassle that would later turn out to be, I would have kept using them.)<\/p>\r\n It eventually occurred to me that there must be a better way. In particular: in older Mac operating systems, each file had an associated \u201ctype\u201d and \u201ccreator\u201d (both represented as four-letter strings, often in all-uppercase). And old Mac files still have that metadata even in modern versions of macOS. But I wasn\u2019t sure how to find it.<\/p>\r\n.fm<\/code>. I created a list of those files and started opening them, but then I noticed that there were a fair number of files in the same directories that had no filename extension but that were nonetheless FrameMaker files.<\/p>\r\n