CW 9.6 doesn't set creator/type of Mach-O executable?

I realize I'm doing something that technically Apple doesn't support, but I
have a bunch of internal tool applications that I prefer to build as Mach-O
executables rather than application packages, and it has always worked until
now. For a little while this stopped working today (the app would not
launch and was called "damaged" by the finder), and I had tentatively
attributed it to upgrading from

CW 9.4 + OSX 10.3.7 + XCode 1.5

to

CW 9.6 + OSX 10.4.2 + XCode 2.2

While it wasn't working, I noticed that the executable did not have its
creator/type set. Setting the creator/type by hand, then the app launched.

Looking through a haphazard archive of previously built executables, I
discovered that several others built in the older configuration also did not
have the creator/type set, yet these have always launched (and still do).
One archived app *did* have its creator/type set, and I noticed this one did
not use the .app file suffix. Yet it also is able to launch, and is not
called a "Unix Executable File" by the Finder.

At some point a couple years back I had to start using the .app suffix in
order to prevent the "Unix Executable File" classification which also
resulted in failure to launch, and the same problem behavior happens now if
I remove the .app suffix from the name of the executable to be built. Yet
also, if I remove the .app suffix, this does *not* result in CodeWarrior
setting the creator/type. So pretty much everything is inconsistent.

The app in question has started launching again, in spite of the lack of the
correct creator/type (the presence of which seemed to have helped earlier
when I added it by hand). Go figure, the Finder (or launch services) has
never shown any kind of consistency in things like this.

But I would think that CodeWarrior should honor the specified creator/type
for the output file, and so that much looks like a bug to me. If setting
the creator/type for a project type "Executable" is not supported, then the
creator/type edit fields should be disabled in the prefs panel for that
case.

-Kurt Bigler

.

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