Even though the deadline for filing US Income Taxes is still a week and a
day away, I decided to procrstinate no longer and get it taken care of
tonight.
On the way home for work I stopped at an office supply store and bought
TurboTax Deluxe, which I've used in years past. It's usually been pretty
painless, but this year I had to fight with it before I even got started
on the actual tax stuff...
Since I did last years taxes I've upgraded to a MacBook Pro and
"trickled down" my PowerBook to Shauna. Once I bought the new machine I
hooked the two laptops up with a cross over cable and rsync'ed the contents of
~michael/ off of the PowerBook and onto ~michael/PowerBook
on the MacBook.
As needed I've had ready access to saved files & data and haven't had
any problems with the rsync approach. TurboTax, however, doesn't believe it
can open last years return (which I want since it'll speed things up for this
year since I won't have to re-enter a lot of information that hasn't
changed, etc.)
I went to the TurboTax website, but it wants me to "login" before it'll let
me read the search results whose titles seem like they might plausibly be of
help. I'm fairly sure I have a login but since I can guarantee it'd be a
fairly complex password (and one that I've never used anywhere else) I know
it'd take me a while to remember or find it.
So I ask Caleb to let me use his mother's laptop, login, go to Finder
and see that it lists last years saved return as being a "Turbo Tax File"
in Finder. On the MacBook finder shows it being a "plain text" kind of file.
Running the Unix file command on both laptops reports that the
file is data.
So I wonder; how does Finder know to associate the file on the PowerBook
with TurboTax? And why on the PowerBook does it think it is a text file?
The first thing that comes to mind: rscyncing the file wouldn't
have preserved the resource fork.
In OS X you can examine the resource fork of a file using standard
Unix tools using the filename/rsrc. That is, for my file "2006_Return"
I can ls -l 2006_Return/rsrc.
That, however, only showed me that the resource fork was 0-bytes (i.e.,
empty) on both laptops.
Back to square one. Googling on "kind" (what the Finder column-label
calls the file type it displays) is a bit difficult since kind is rather
generic and people don't normally talk about a "kind of file" as much
as a "file type."
I finally found a very detailed post on the Mac OS X Hints forums that laid out the algorithm Apple uses to
associate a given file with a given application in the Finder.
From those clues I did some more searching on file type and creator
signature codes and came up with a very helpful
Indiana University Information Technology Services
knowledge base
article entitled "In Mac OS and Mac OS X, what are file types
and creators?".
In old (pre-OS X) versions of the Macintosh operating system the file
system mainted various pieces of metadata (apparently separate from the
resource fork) for every file. Specifically a 4-character "file type" code
and a 4-character "creator" code. Most new OS X software doesn't carry
on this tradition, apparently, but might TurboTax?
Next question: how to check what the file type and creator codes are?
(The Indiana U. KB article had links to some shareware/freeware tools that
let you set & see them but I didn't think I should have to download or
buy additional software.)
I fired up tclsh trying to remember if, on the Mac, there were
any extra file subcomands for dealing with such things. I didn't
see any; (file stat $file var, for example, did not have any
legacy-Macintosh values in it. I'm pretty sure Tcl on the Mac could have
solved it for me, but rather than dig up that arcane knowledge I decided
to search and find what installed Unix tools might be up to the task.
I found that there were two helpful utilities available since
I'd installed Apple's Developers Tools on both laptops: GetFileInfo
and SetFile.
Running /Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo on the PowerBook showed me:
file: "/Path/to/return"
type: "TaxR"
creator: "MIT6"
On the MacBook the type & creator were the empty string. I was able to
set these values with:
$ /Developer/Tools/SetFile -t TaxR /Path/to/return
$ /Developer/Tools/SetFile -c MIT6 /Path/to/return
I restarted TurboTax 2007 and this time it saw my 2006 return and so I'm
able to start finally...
Perhaps this blog post will be helpful to some future TurboTax Macintosh
user who has transfered files from one machine to another...
