Hi, Thanks for responding!
Thirdly, every filetype available on a PC is availiable on a mac, as long as a compatible application is avaliable (so include all M$ applications and adobe applications, and any other company thats any good). The finder uses a long (4 bytes) to store the application type. There are therefore at least 64*64*64*64 possible applications that use normal ascii for that. Have a look at netatalk for a list of some avaliable (the etc/AppleVolumes.system file contains a list). On my system there are about 250 extension to Finder Tag conversions, but what most people do is run a netatalk application to regenerate that file, based on what a particular system has used. Remember the Finder Tag referes to the Application that made it, not the file type, so things like .wav .jpg .gif may have several different tags, one for each application that can create them. You need to pick the one that your system uses.
What I'm trying to achieve is to set the filetype and creator fields on my external HFS-volume so that the correct icon appears on my Mac. I noticed that say for a .jpg or for a .txt even if these fields contain 0 this assignment is automatically done by Mac-OS when an external volume is mounted but for a .pdf or a .cpp file for eg. the generic icon appears. Once I set some default filetype and creator for a .pdf file the correct icon does appear. So what I need actually is not a one-to-many mapping (of all possible applications which deal with a particular kind of file) but some default one-to-one mapping of standard applications used to open a particular file - say MSWD for .doc files and so on.
I am not familiar with netatalk at all. Sorry if this is a newbie question but how exactly do I proceed ?
Regards, Nandini