S
studiomaster
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I'm just wondering if .installer is an installation file in MacOS just like .exe is in Windows...is it true?
dgatwood
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studiomaster said:
Mac OS X's standard installer packages end with .pkg (normal package) or .mpkg (a meta-package that installs one or more other packages, e.g. the iLife installer package which installs the iTunes.pkg, iPhoto.pkg, and others).
Other things you'll often see are .sea (stuffit self extracting archive), .sit (stuffit archive), .cpt (compact pro archive, an old Mac OS 9 legacy format that is openable by stuffit expander), .uue (UUencode, a method for encoding a binary form as ASCII text), .hqx (BinHex, similar to uuencode but capable of handling applications and files with resource forks), .bin (MacBinary, a format for storing applications/files with resource forks in a format that can be sent over the internet), .applesingle/.appledouble (similar to MacBinary, only the latter is split into two files, one for data fork, one for resource fork), .tar/.tgz/.tar.gz (a Tape ARchive file, a UNIX format for putting multiple files into a single archive, extended in Mac OS X 10.4 to support resource forks using appledouble files whose names start with period-underscore; the gz form is a compressed form using gzip compression; you may also see .tbz, .tar.bz, and .tar.bz2, which uses bzip2 compression instead), .pax (a pax archive, extracted with the command-line "pax" command), and .shar (a UNIX format in which an executable shell script creates all the necessary files).
Another popular archiving format is .dmg, which is a disk image. You might occasionally see other disk image formats such as .iso (UNIX/Linux/Windows). You might occasionally see the old Mac OS 9 formats, which are .smi and .img. There are probably some others that I'm not thinking of.
But I've never heard of .installer files. Somebody just probably decided to name an installer application to end in .installer.