What Is The App File Format For Mac

Finally, if you want to see what other Apps are available to use to convert your video files, you can select a file, right-click and go to Open With to see a list of apps on your Mac that can open the file. You’ll see an option at the bottom called App Store. This will open the App Store and you can see the available Apps that can. How to Change Default Mac App for Any File Type. Find a file of the type you want to change the default mac app for by opening Finder. Some file types won’t show you the extension that identifies the type of file. The extension is the ending of the file. For example a picture file type known as JPEG has a file ending of JPG.

Mach-O
Filename extension
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)com.apple.mach-o-binary
Developed byCarnegie Mellon University, Apple Inc.
Type of formatBinary, executable, object, shared libraries, core dump
Container forARM, SPARC, PA-RISC, PowerPC and x86executable code, memory image dumps

Mach-O, short for Machobject file format, is a file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, dynamically-loaded code, and core dumps. A replacement for the a.out format, Mach-O offers more extensibility and faster access to information in the symbol table.

Mach-O is used by most systems based on the Mach kernel. NeXTSTEP, macOS, and iOS are examples of systems that use this format for native executables, libraries and object code.

Mach-O file layout[edit]

What Is The App File Format For Mac

Each Mach-O file is made up of one Mach-O header, followed by a series of load commands, followed by one or more segments, each of which contains between 0 and 255 sections. Mach-O uses the REL relocation format to handle references to symbols. When looking up symbols Mach-O uses a two-level namespace that encodes each symbol into an 'object/symbol name' pair that is then linearly searched for, first by the object and then the symbol name.[1]

The basic structure—a list of variable-length 'load commands' that reference pages of data elsewhere in the file[2]—was also used in the executable file format for Accent.[citation needed] The Accent file format was in turn, based on an idea from Spice Lisp.[citation needed]

Multi-architecture binaries[edit]

Under NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, macOS, and iOS, multiple Mach-O files can be combined in a multi-architecture binary. This allows a single binary file to contain code to support multiple instruction set architectures. For example, a multi-architecture binary for iOS can have 6 instruction set architectures, namely ARMv6 (for iPhone, 3G and 1st / 2nd generation iPod touch), ARMv7 (for iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, iPad, 2, 3rd generation and 3rd–5th generation iPod touch), ARMv7s (for iPhone 5 and iPad (4th generation)), ARMv8 (for iPhone 5S), x86 (for iPhone simulator on 32-bit machines) and x86_64 (64-bit simulator).[citation needed]

Minimum OS version[edit]

With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6 platform the Mach-O file underwent a significant modification that causes binaries compiled on a computer running 10.6 or later to be (by default) executable only on computers running Mac OS X 10.6 or later. The difference stems from load commands that the dynamic linker, in previous Mac OS X versions, does not understand. Another significant change to the Mach-O format is the change in how the Link Edit tables (found in the __LINKEDIT section) function. In 10.6 these new Link Edit tables are compressed by removing unused and unneeded bits of information, however Mac OS X 10.5 and earlier cannot read this new Link Edit table format. To make backwards-compatible executables, the linker flag '-mmacosx-version-min=' can be used.

Other implementations[edit]

Some versions of NetBSD have had Mach-O support added as part of an implementation of binary compatibility, which allowed some Mac OS 10.3 binaries to be executed.[3][4]

For Linux, a Mach-O loader was written by Shinichiro Hamaji[5] that can load 10.6 binaries. As a more extensive solution based on this loader, the Darling Project aims at providing a complete environment allowing OS X applications to run on Linux.

For the Ruby programming language, the ruby-macho[6] library provides an implementation of a Mach-O binary parser and editor.

See also[edit]

App

References[edit]

  1. ^'OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference'. Apple Inc. February 4, 2009. Archived from the original on August 19, 2009. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
  2. ^Avadis Tevanian, Jr.; Richard F. Rashid; Michael W. Young; David B. Golub; Mary R. Thompson; William Bolosky; Richard Sanzi. 'A Unix Interface for Shared Memory and Memory Mapped Files Under Mach': 8.Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ^Emmanuel Dreyfus (June 20, 2006). 'Mach and Darwin binary compatiblity [sic] for NetBSD/powerpc and NetBSD/i386'. Retrieved October 18, 2013.
  4. ^Emmanuel Dreyfus (September 2004), Mac OS X binary compatibility on NetBSD: challenges and implementation(PDF)
  5. ^Shinichiro Hamaji, Mach-O loader for Linux - I wrote...
  6. ^William Woodruff, A pure-Ruby library for parsing Mach-O files.

App File Format For Mac

External links[edit]

  • OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference (Apple Inc.)
  • Mach-O(5) – Darwin and macOS File Formats Manual
  • Mach Object Files (NEXTSTEP documentation)

Mac Disk Format Types

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