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Gotchas

Be careful installing software. Apples pax-based installer does some funny things. For example, it removes symlinks and replaces them with directories if it is trying to install a file in a subdir that you've replaced with a symlink! So, if it wants to install /foo/bar/bin/program and you've make a symlink from /foo/bar to /local/foo/bar, it will remove the link and you'll end up with a directory /foo/bar/bin with a single program in it. Also, it occasionally screws up badly (installing XTools from tenon blew away my entire /Applications directory!) Blair MacIntyre


 Along those same lines, I've noticed that web downloads of UNIX software get munged by Stuffit Expander, which appears to be
 the default app for unpacking gzipped tar files. It unzips and untars alright, but really screws up the newlines in text files.
 I usually have to unpack the stuff again from the command line. There's probably a way to disable Stuffit as the default unpacker,
 but I don't know how.

 -JimG

Open StuffIt Expander, and under Preferences there is an option called "Cross Platform." You can turn off the conversion of line endings there.

I'm not sure how to stop the automatic launch however. In StuffIt Expander's Preferences there is an option to tell it which extensions to claim. I don't think that this does much however. It seems to be automatically launched by the Web Browser. IE maintains its own list of helper apps which you can edit under its preferences panel. OmniWeb seems to use whatever the Mac OS would normally use. To edit this, choose a file that ends with .gz, choose "Get Info", and there is a panel to change the application for that extension. The only problem is that I'm not sure what you would change it to.



UPDATE! StuffIt 7.0 address this issue so download it at www.stuffit.com