[Pythonmac-SIG] Adding resource fork support to tarfile.py

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:52 AM, Apple Consultants Network wrote:

>
> On Jul 18, 2006, at 6:45 PM, David M. Cooke wrote:
>
>>
>> You've got to explicitly handle the resource fork yourself. The tar
>> format (AFAIK) doesn't support any notion of extra metadata or
>> forks of a file. Tiger's tar fakes it by saving the resource fork
>> as a separate file   with '._' added to the front (e.g., for
>> 'hello.font', it stores the data fork as 'hello.font', and the
>> resource fork as '._hello.font').
>>
>> I've attached two scripts I wrote a while ago that handle the
>> resource forks in this way.
>>
>
> David,
>
> Thank you very much for the scripts.  I am just about to dig into
> them today.  I was afraid that this would be the case.  I was hoping
> the support for resources forks would come for free under Tiger.
> Again, I really appreciate the help.

One would hope, but Apple forgot to expose the hooks that they're  
using in the command-line tools... so third party developers still  
have to deal with resource forks by hand. The only difference now is  
that they can alternatively use the xattr API to do so, but that's  
not much of a win.

-bob