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On 10 Apr 2008, at 04:05, gary ng wrote:

This is pretty off-topic, but resource forks are not
metadata.

off-topic or not, I am curious to know why resource
forks are not metadata.

Because they are the actual data. Metadata is typically optional.

A Mac file can have BOTH data and resource forks, and BOTH can have data in them.

For example, the Mac Classic outliner Acta saved text in the data fork and sound annotations in the resource fork.

A blind copy would copy just the data fork, and thus strip out the recorded sound.

I know the Mac OS X "cp" command now deals with this, but I think this behavior was added only in 10.3 or so.

Say if I have a 'file'(in modern day sense they are
just a byte stream), anything that is not in this
stream(which are not handled by read then write by the
file module) are metadata, no ?


You're still making the assumption that a file is a byte stream. It is not. It's a collection of forks (the resource fork and the data fork can each be considered byte streams).

I'm not as familiar with the recent Windows file systems which have multiple forks, but I think they'd be a problem as well.

David Dunham       Development Manager
+1 206 926 5722      GameHouse Studios