nospam wrote:
In article , Tim Streater
wrote:

| The type of a file and which app you'd like it to open with are items
| of file metadata and have no business being part of the filename.

| Many files have such type-identifiers included. E.g., a JPG file begins
| with JFIF, a WordPerfect file includes WPC in the first line, an MS .doc

| Then you've put the metadata inside the file, which is even worse. It
| should be part of the file system.

This is the problem with mixing Mac and Windows
discussions. As I understand it, Mac stores file data
separately as a "resource fork".
No, you have it back to front. File data went in the data fork,
metadata went in the resource fork.

no it didn't.

metadata was kept in the file system.

the resource fork (which was optional, as was the data fork) held
various resources. it was basically a miniature database.

a zero-length file would have an empty data *and* resource fork. rare,
but possible.

Unfortunately Apple has abandoned
this idea and settled for the lowest-common-denominator approach, and
w're all the worse off for it.

yep.

NTFS Alternate Streams is the functional equivalent
of Resource and Data fork - but nobody abuses it. Because
of the inter-working issues it would cause.

In Windows, currently an Alternate Stream on a file, can be used
to "mark" the file as being downloaded from the Internet, and
thus "untrustworthy". It's the kind of metadata that doesn't
need to be preserved, so if a person copied the file from
NTFS to FAT32 and back to NTFS again, no one is the wiser.

Kaspersky AV, many releases back, was one of the first applications
to widely use the feature. It stored some sort of checksum or hash,
as a means of speeding up file scanning. And the technique was
abandoned after a small percentage of users experienced side
effects (of some sort).

And I don't even think there is a tool to pack the
streams, for transport to foreign systems.

http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles...-streams.phtml

The support for Alternate Streams... is about as good
as the support for Sparse files.

Paul