Way to retrieve creator-type of OS X files?

[Robert Brenstein]

>>But it can't be extended to get the finder label, for example.
>
>True.  I was merely offering an immediate solution for the original 
>poster's request.  The label property would be a good nice-to-have 
>-- obtainable via AppleScript?

Yes but slow for a larger number of files. Would be fine for single 
files though.

>>I am also curious about performance when calling this function 50 
>>times for a folder with 800 image files.
>
>Why 50 times if the folder contains 800 files?

Just random numbers representing some folder with images. My 
impression from the original poster was that he was processing a 
subset of files from a larger collection. But these are probably not 
applicable here. My bad.

>I wouldn't use that function for multiple files, as it's designed 
>for single files

Agreed and it is probably what the original poster wanted as he did 
not imply batch processing.

>and it would be much faster to just grab "the detailed files" and 
>parse the result for everything at once.

True if all the files were in the same folder.

>In fact, given the overhead of the XCMD interface and the latency 
>inherent in file I/O, if you want to get the type and creator code 
>for 800 files in a folder I'd guess it would be faster to parse "the 
>detailed files" than to call an external designed to work on single 
>files that many times.

My program (which is a different case from the original poster since 
I am doing batch processing) is working with Rinaldi's externals in 
HyperCard (processing mostly labels and aliases) and it is reasonably 
fast processing hundreds of files in a multitude of folders. Rev 
should not be any slower.

Robert