[Pythonmac-SIG] Accessing Resource forks

[Nicholas Riley]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 02:55:55PM -0700, Christopher Barker wrote:
> The other obvious option is to look for the ._* files, which is where
> the resource fork is stored with the SMB protocol. However, we're
> concerned that that may not be reliable -- if a file were put up with
> SMB, then replaced with AFP, there may be a ._* file, but it won't
> work right. This actually seems pretty likely as while we have this
> mixed system, there have been a lot of "that didn't work, please put
> the file back up with APF" iterations.

Yeah, SFM uses NTFS's "stream" support to store the resource fork and
other Mac specific metadata elsewhere.  You can check the resource
fork size by looking at "/path/to/file/..namedfork/rsrc" but since the
type and creator aren't stored in the resource fork, you'll have to
get those in other ways if you want to preserve them.

Note that forthcoming Mac OS X versions may no longer use ._ files to
store resource forks on SMB mounted volumes (some third-party clients
already don't), instead reading/writing to alternate streams just as
SFM does.

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>