Re: PDF.exe inside Mathematica.app on OS X
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- Subject: [mg127605] Re: PDF.exe inside Mathematica.app on OS X
- From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma at 12000.org>
- Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2012 04:38:49 -0400 (EDT)
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On 8/5/2012 1:59 PM, awnl wrote: >> When certain 3D graphics is rendered in Mathematica 8.0.4 on my Mac >> under OS X (10.7.4), I can see from the Mac's Activity Monitor that a >> process PDF.exe is activated. And inside the Mathematica.app package >> there's a file: >> >> >> /Applications/Mathematica.app/SystemFiles/Converters/Binaries/MacOSX-x86-64/PDF.exe >> >> I thought .exe always referred to a Windows PC executable. What's >> going on here? > > Nothing special, on unix-like systems as OS X a "binary executable file" > can have any file extension you want (or none, which is actually the > standard convention). To give a binary executable the extension .exe is > perfectly valid, although somewhat unusual. I think WRI did choose that > extension to keep things as uniform across platforms as possible, it > doesn't mean these executables have anything to do with Windows. I > haven't tried, but I'm sure you can check that they are normal > executables for your OS. > Actually, I found a bug using firefox when I download a .exe file. When the same file does NOT have a .exe in the name, then the file is downloaded corrupted. It was always missing 200 bytes or so. Using normal download of any file, i.e. using SAVE LINK AS--> then download the file. I added .exe to the same exact file, and download it, now all the bytes are downloaded, and I can run the file just fine on my PC. I know it is not good idea to download a .exe from a web site, but it is my site, and I had some demos there I build on Linux and was checking the files by downloding them, when I found this problem. I think what happens is that the browser uses binary transmission when it sees .exe in the name, otherwise, with no extension, it was using ASCII transmission, and hence this results in corrupted the file. Any way, having an extension .exe added to exeutable name is good idea, even on linux if for no reason other than to allow one to see that the file is an executable just from the name. Otherwise, one needs to use the file() command on Linux to find out the file type. This is one thing I can think of that windows did correctly compared to Unix/Linux :) --Nasser