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OS X uses HFS+ resource forks for a variety of things, beginning around 10.4. Prior to Mavericks, they were used to handle ACLs, to track Time Machine metadata
by gecko 12y ago
OS X uses HFS+ resource forks for a variety of things, beginning around 10.4. Prior to Mavericks, they were used to handle ACLs, to track Time Machine metadata, to track whether a file was downloaded or native to the file system (which in turn shows up as a Finder warning when launching applications you downloaded from the Internet) and where it was downloaded from, and some other minor things. Beginning with Mavericks, they were also used to support giving files arbitrary tags, which is what I had in mind. You can read more about the implementation at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/ .
Notably, while all of the above use resource forks, they're not exposed to the user directly as resource forks, but rather as additional Finder widgets and behaviors.
- frik 12y agoSystem wide metadata and tag support is great. Sadly, both Win and Mac are lacking in this discipline. It's ironic that Windows XP exposed the ADS in the file property dialog "summary" tab: http://www.infosecwriters.com/texts.php?op=display&id=53 http://www.infosecwriters.com/texts.php?op=display&id=53 Vista onwards one can only view (also in XP) and edit metadata for supported file formats like jpg, doc, docx, mp3, etc. Such formats have its own metadata format like ID3 for mp3 and EXIF/IPTC/XMP for jpeg that explorer.exe and windows media player support. OSX uses ADS or sidecar files (on FAT/NTFS/network) but only supports 7 colors that can be mapped to tags (mean on every PC different things; similar to MS Outlook tags). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file Seeing the OSX sidecar files is really annoying (beginning with a dot and have otherwise the same name as the original file) on Windows. (a bit similar to the thumbs.db) The same goes for WinNT6+ that creates multi GB preview cache-database files in the users directory instead of one "thumbs.db" per directory - ultra annoying :( It would be great, if Microsoft and Apple could agree on a new metadata sidecar standard (like XMP from Adobe, now ISO standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform ). My proposal: One zip file containing all XMP metadata sidecar files and file preview pictures of the current directory.