Red Hat Diaries/0014

Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 I

As the ADC (Apple Develper Connection) online documentation points out, applications are rarely shipped and installed as a single file. Instead, they comprise 'bundles' and bundles that weirdly enough have to conform to rules which I for one have yet to fathom any wisdom in (and my fear is this supposed wisdom will remain elusive).

Rule One: An application is not an application - it's a directory.

Yeppers, the files with the 'app' extension 'appear' to be files and not directories, but this is collusion between the on-disk layout and the Finder. They're really directories. For these directories to work in the glamorous OS X (and previous versions of MacOS), the following rules must also apply.

Rule Two - Adobe's own: The application directory must contain an empty file of the exact same name.

Here's what it looks like for the application/directory Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0. This file is not mandatory but Adobe puts it there anyway.

drwxrwxr-x   4 root  admin  264 Nov 29 19:35 .
drwxrwxr-x  22 root  admin  704 Jan 20 22:35 ..
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root  admin    0 Oct 12 13:24 Acrobat Reader 5.0
drwxrwxr-x   7 root  admin  264 Nov 29 19:35 Contents

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