I don't care who wins - I don't have a horse in this race at all. I'm sure the FTP devs were just trying to get something working - they weren't worried about

I don't care who wins - I don't have a horse in this race at all. I'm sure the FTP devs were just trying to get something working - they weren't worried about supporting all the possibilities for the definition of "file". I'd guess the only people who really care are those affected (mainly VMS/Apple people who have to send/receive files via FTP). Well, I guess if I was trying to FTP a file that had data in an alternate data stream (ADS) from an NTFS drive, I'd care. But then I know that the ADS wouldn't be sent by FTP and package the file accordingly. I don't think POSIX designed anything - they just codified/standardized what was running in the wild. Wouldn't something like the VMS-equivalent of a tar archive of your files work better for round-tripping to a non-VMS computer? The largest use of alternate data streams is actually when a user downloads a file from the Internet via Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox on WinXP+. The browser creates an alternate data stream, Zone.Identifier, for the downloaded file so Windows will know that the file may be tainted. see https://guyrleech.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/where-did-that-download-come-from/ https://guyrleech.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/where-did-that-do...