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<blockquote data-quote="Randy B. Singer" data-source="post: 1865868" data-attributes="member: 190607">Here's what's going on.&nbsp; Years ago the Macintosh used two types of invisible metadata to identify files, called &quot;File Type&quot; and &quot;Creator&quot;.&nbsp; That allowed your Mac to instantly know what a file was (and show the proper icon for it) and to know what application should be used to open it.When the Macintosh moved to OS X, which is based on Unix, Apple moved away from using the File Type and Creator meta data and instead began to use file extensions, such as &quot;file.txt&quot; and later what is known as &quot;Uniform type identifiers&quot;.&nbsp; Beginning with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, creator codes are ignored entirely by OS X (now called the macOS).Sometimes when you move an older file over to a newer Mac, the file will have no FileType or Creator data, and no extension either.&nbsp; In that case, your Mac doesn't know what the file is or what application should be used to open it, so it shows up as a random Unix file.&nbsp; You can fix this by simply appending a file extension to the name of a file.&nbsp; Or, you can instead click on a representative file and choose Get Info and under Open With you can choose which application to open that file with.&nbsp; You can even choose right there to have all such files with the application of your choice.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Randy B. Singer, post: 1865868, member: 190607"] Here's what's going on. Years ago the Macintosh used two types of invisible metadata to identify files, called "File Type" and "Creator". That allowed your Mac to instantly know what a file was (and show the proper icon for it) and to know what application should be used to open it. When the Macintosh moved to OS X, which is based on Unix, Apple moved away from using the File Type and Creator meta data and instead began to use file extensions, such as "file.txt" and later what is known as "Uniform type identifiers". Beginning with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, creator codes are ignored entirely by OS X (now called the macOS). Sometimes when you move an older file over to a newer Mac, the file will have no FileType or Creator data, and no extension either. In that case, your Mac doesn't know what the file is or what application should be used to open it, so it shows up as a random Unix file. You can fix this by simply appending a file extension to the name of a file. Or, you can instead click on a representative file and choose Get Info and under Open With you can choose which application to open that file with. You can even choose right there to have all such files with the application of your choice. [/QUOTE]

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