You couldn't map all the properties of the resource fork into an inode block of the time in UFS. It has stuff like the icon. More modern fs may have larger directory block structure and can handle the data better.
I’d say this is not the right way to describe a resource fork. Instead, think of it as two sets of file contents—one called "data" and one called "rsrc". On-disk, they are both just bytestreams.
The catch is that you usually store a specific structure in the resource fork—smaller chunks of data indexed by 4-byte type codes and 2-byte integer IDs. Applications on the 68K normally stored everything in the resource fork. Code, menus, dialog boxes, pictures, icons, strings, and whatever else. If you copy an old Mac application to a PC or Unix system without translation, what you got was an empty file. This meant that Mac applications had to be encoded into a single stream to be sent over the network… early on, that meant BinHex .hqx or MacBinary .bin, and later on you saw Stuffit .sit archives.
That’s why these structures don’t fit into an inode—it’s like you’re trying to cram a whole goddamn file in there. The resource fork structure had internal limits that capped it at 16 MB, but you could also just treat it as a separate stream of data and make it as big as you want.
> While the data fork allows random access to any offset within it, access to the resource fork works like extracting structured records from a database.
So, whatever the on-disk structure, the motivation here is that from an OS API perspective, software (including the OS itself) can interact with files as one "seekable stream of bytes" (the data fork), and one "random-access key-value store where the values are seekable streams of bytes" (the resource fork).
So not quite metadata vs data, but rather "structured data" (in the sense that it's in a known format that's machine-readable as a data structure to the OS itself) and "unstructured data."
The on-disk representation was arbitrary; in theory, some version of HFS could have stored the data and resource forks contiguously in a single extent and just kept an inode property to specify the delimiting offset between the two. Or could have stored each hunk of the resource fork in its own extent, pre-offset-indexed within the inode; and just concatenated those on read / split them on write, if you used the low-level API that allows resource forks to be read/written as bytestreams.
This in mind, it's curious that we never saw an archive file format that sends the hunks within the resource fork as individual files in the archive beside the data-fork file, to allow for random access / single-file extraction of resource-fork hunks. After all, that's what we eventually got with NeXT bundle directories: all the resource-fork stuff "exploded" into a Resources/ dir inside the bundle.
This adage translated to classic MacOS becomes "Everything is a resource". The Resource Manager started out as developer cope from Bruce Horn for not having access to SmallTalk anymore[0], but turned out to completely overtake the entire Macintosh Toolbox API. Packaging everything as type-coded data with standard-ish formats meant cross-cutting concerns like localization or demand paging were brokered through the Resource Manager.
All of this sounds passe today because you can just use directories and files, and have the shell present the whole application as a single object. In fact, this is what all the ex-Apple staff who moved to NeXT wound up doing, which is why OSX has directories that end in .app with a bunch of separate files instead. The reason why they couldn't do this in 1984 is very simple: the Macintosh File System (MFS) that Apple shipped had only partial folder support.
To be clear, MFS did actually have folders[1], but only one directory[2] for the entire volume. What files went in which folders was stored in a separate special file that only the Finder read. There was no Toolbox support for reading folder contents, just the master directory, so applications couldn't actually put files in folders. Not even using the Toolbox file pickers.
And this meant the "sane approach" NeXT and OSX took was actually impossible in the system they were developing. Resources needed to live somewhere, so they added a second bytestream to every file and used it to store something morally equivalent to another directory that only holds resources. The Resource Manager treats an MFS disk as a single pile of files that each holds a single pile of resources.
[0] https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html?sort=d...
[1] As in, a filesystem object that can own other filesystem objects.
[2] As in, a list of filesystem objects. Though in MFS's case it's more like an inode table...
> I’d say this is not the right way to describe a resource fork. Instead, think of it as two sets of file contents—one called "data" and one called "rsrc". On-disk, they are both just bytestreams.
I think it's a perfectly fine way. You're just coming at it from a wildly different level of abstraction.
One could say yours is not the right way either and jump down into quantum fields as another level.
Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt, thrashing the disk like crazy on any save. Apple's algorithm would shift huge chunks of the file multiple times per set of updates, when usually it would be better to just rewrite the entire file once. IIRC, part of the problem was an implicit commitment to never strictly requiring more than a few KBs of available disk space.
In a sense, the resource fork was just too easy and accessible. In the long run, Mac users ended up suffering from it more than they benefited. When Apple finally got rid of it, the rejoice was pretty much universal. There was none of the nostalgia that usually accompanies disappearing Apple techs, especially the ones that get removed outright instead of upgraded (though one could argue that's what plists, XML and bundles did.)
It was a lot of fun and something I’ve missed in modern computing. Not even desktop Linux is really fills that void. ResEdit and the way it exposed everything complete with built-in editors was really something special.
One of the big problems with resource forks was that no other system supported them so to host a mac file on a non-mac drive or an ftp server, etc, the file had to be converted to something that contained both parts, then converted back when brought to the mac. It was a PITA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(AD...
It got used occasionally - not a lot. I had a newsgroup reader that would store the date of the last time you downloaded items for a group in an EA (of the file that had the items).
E.g. Dropbox, which syncs some extended attributes (and uses some for internal metadata), seems to store them in the ADS on Windows.
Application metadata describing what file types an application could open, what icons to use for those file types if they matched the application’s creator code was stored in the resource fork of the application, but file metadata never was stored in the resource fork. File types, creator codes, lock, invisible, bozo, etc. bits always were stored in the file system.
See for example the description of the MFS disk format at https://wiki.osdev.org/MFS#File_Directory_Blocks
I can probably look it up and figure it out myself, ah, the joys of learning about obsolete tech!
Prefixing the file name with a single dot - is this a file system convention ? Or just a "good idea" ?
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
I don't recall there ever being a way to turn it off for local volumes.
It seems to be the first time I'm seeing Apple themselves officially recommending a "defaults write" command.
I can see after .DS_Store was allowed, it was no problem for other engineers to approve .fseventsd or .Spotlight-V100 or other nonsense that has cropped up over the years.
And I can't tell you how many filesystems I've had "corrupted" with these sorts of files.
Mostly SD cards, usb flash drives, but occasionally something horrible.
for these kinds of things I usually run:
rm -rf .DS_Store .Trashes ._.Trashes .fseventsd .Spotlight-V100
If you've had a disk that is going bad and you need to copy stuff off of it, the LAST thing you want is to index the whole thing and start writing to it.
seriously, there should be a setting.
Put that in a script and add it to your crontab.
Besides, there are .DS_Store I really don't wanna delete. Notably, there are git repos which have erroneously committed .DS_Store files; I don't wanna make those repos dirty by deleting them.
You have a good coding style.
It wasn't Apple's fault, but it still would have been nice if there was a way to turn them off.
Growing up with both System 7.5 / OSX, and windows machines, the Macs never seemed inclined to make me see extraneous files, filetypes, and other “how the computer works” implementation details. It’s just so odd to my mental model of it all to see this file end up everywhere.
It is very ugly when files are shared from a Mac to people on Windows though. I think it gives a bad first impression for anyone who might be thinking of transitioning to the Mac.
Apple's polish has always been more about the surface then the internals.
It seems like a better solution.
This is my number one frustration with the Finder.
You can customize the look and size of individual folder windows in many interesting ways, al a the Classic Mac OS Finder, which is a really great feature. But if you blow through that same folder in a browser window then most of those customization are lost, overwritten with the settings of that browser window, even if you never change anything.
What's the point of allowing all of these great customizations when they're so easily clobbered?
I have a global hot key to bring up the Applications folder. I'd love to customize the look of that window, but it's pointless. Whenever I hit that hot key I have no idea what I'm going to get. It's always getting reset.
By the way, the reason it does this is because the Finder has no way to set a default browser window configuration. So instead, it just leaves behind the current browser settings in each folder it visits. Super frustrating.
Not global, but as long as you're in the Finder cmd-shift-A opens the Applications folder. cmd-shift-U opens the Utilities folder.
I guess macos probably just uses GNU tar? It's kind of surprising it wasn't modified or configured by default to ignore .DS_Store.
It was, but not by default.
If you export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true then tar will skip .DS_Store files.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/lvju40/comment/gpc8i...
Since my network shares are for a local Synology, it's not a a big deal for me. I have run into them at work before, and it does create quite the mess.
[0] https://superuser.com/questions/212896/is-there-any-way-to-p...
(setq dired-omit-mode t
dired-omit-files "^.+\\.\\(DS_Store\\|aux\\|bak\\|bbl\\|bcf\\|blg\\|dvi\\|ent\\|idx\\|ilg\\|ind\\|log\\|orig\\|out\\|pdf-view-restore\\|pdf#\\|reg\\|run.xml\\|synctex.gz\\|toc\\)$")And a follow up article - https://rixstep.com/2/20061212,00.shtml
I would think that the file manager for an entirely separate operating system being written from scratch would be a foregone conclusion.
I'll never get how some rocket scientist (IVIE I suspect) removed Apple's best finder feature, colored file folders, which made for easy sorting. To make matters worse, added stupid dot labels instead. What a cluster.
Oh well. Still a bad day on a Mac is better than a great day in Windows.
MacOS creates a junk file/folder just by visiting any folder. It's not comparable.
I think people that get upset about this just need something to fret about, at least in my experience. They probably trim their speaker cables to the same length to match impedence, too.
The preponderance of bespoke NIH is glaring: filesystems, network protocols, "resource forks" (this one goes WAY back to pascal-OS days). Given that OS X was a significant rewrite and embrace of Posix, it's a mystery why they wouldn't have gone further with this.
I think the lack of a mature server OS reflects this. Single-user allows for a lot of workarounds, but a true multiuser runtime can't be hipster for its own sake.
Interesting to see that apps were split into front and back end (indeed, I'm surprised even that the terms existed) back in 1999.
Originally a central DB and a PC front end. But the server could be doing business processing e.g. feeds and processing of stock prices.
Client Server predates the web.
If Apple wanted to store view settings for remote volumes (or even local volumes), the competent design would have been to store them locally (and per user) in a central location on the machine doing the browsing.
I remember the promised re-write of Finder and thought it never happened. Nothing seems to have improved for the user. I could post a list of decades-old defects that persist today.
The one thing I can think of that has finally been fixed (and this was long after the "rewrite") was that you can now finally sort the file list properly: with folders at the top.
Now I wish someone would explain something that might actually be worse than DS-turds: the presence of a "Contents" subdirectory in every goddamned Apple package. I mean... who thought you needed to create a directory called "Contents" to hold the contents of the parent directory? It's mind-boggling.
It also kind of reveals an underlying attitude of the OS developers: That it's OK to use the user's filesystem (particularly directories owned by the user as opposed to the OS) as their dumping ground for all this metadata. As if it's their hard drive rather than mine.
I'm OK with Apple putting whatever it wants in /System and /Library, but I'd expect the rest of my filesystem to contain only files I put there.
Same goes for you, Microsoft: You can have C:/WINDOWS and I should get the rest of the filesystem.
There are more of this type of offender than I can possibly count that dump myriad dotfiles and dotfolders in your home folder on nixes instead of adhering to platform conventions or XDG or anything, really. Worse, these programs won't function properly if you set your home folder to be read-only (leaving subdirectories writable) to keep it clean. Drives me nuts.
It really should be turned off by default on network volumes though.
> There is also an unfortunate bug that is not fixed to this day that result in an excessive creation of .DS_Store file. Those files should only be created if the user actually makes adjustments to the view settings or set a manual location for icons in a folder. That’s unfortunately not what happens and visiting a folder pretty much guarantees that a .DS_Store file will get created
I get the sense that if you are annoyed by it, you aren't the target audience of Mac OS, the target audience are technologically illiterate people for who it really doesn't matter (they barely know what folders are anyway), so to Apple there is no reason to ever invest any effort to fix it.
It’s because not every bundle does include that folder. Here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS)
Not sure but it could be the case that when you mount a network drive there isn't a stable identifier that can be used to track it.
But the stakes are very low here, so settings can be invalidated and discarded if they can't be resolved or they age out of the local cache. And if the mount is of a type that can't be reliably identified later, the default should have been to do nothing. Spewing junk all over every computer visited, especially junk that won't even survive the next Mac user's visit... is amateur-hour and obnoxious at best.
Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.
I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.
Apple unfortunately isn’t in the business of making powerful, efficient (user-facing) software anymore.
Say what you will about Windows, but the Explore file manager has always been pretty rock solid.
Windows 11 has pretty severely fucked up Explorer. Named directories can't have their path copied (I think 10 did this bullshit, too). The context menu getting insane whitespace, missing options, and having things dynamically load into it is a travesty. It is heartbreaking that mobile-inspired trash is ultimately going to be way you're forced to interact with a computer.
People let their distaste for somebody's bad behavior and/or old things stop them from admitting that we're in a pretty severe backward slide.
I don't know any more because I use Total Commander on Windows...
I’ve long since moved to command line or dual pane explorers but it’s something that makes me pause every time I do find myself in Finder for some reason.
For MacOS I can recommend Forklift [0]. I've been using it for years and it is a bit closer to the Windows Explorer way of doing things. Does what it is meant to do. Affordable. No nags. Gets out of the way. Not perfect, but soooo much better than the horrific experience that is Finder.
I have a paid Forklift 3, and it’s nagging me to upgrade and pay for next version.
I mostly went back to Finder for now, as I remember having some kind of issues with Forklift3 not being performant, though I don’t remember the details.
It does make me wonder though, how do you feel about System 7.0 Finder?
NeXT/Mac column view are great and should be table stakes in a file manager in my opinion.
Command + O to open files/folders in Finder was a bit challenging to remember since Enter/Return just works in Explorer
Command + up arrow is a good shortcut to go up one level, surprisingly hard via gui
...and in Finder, Enter is rename, which is a lot more puzzling, so much that many others have commented on the same and some even tried to justify it:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6727/why-does-the-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16hxjrn/why_is_the_d...
Apologies for my post getting snipped, The latest iOS beta keeps randomly eating my text. Apple is aware.
Agreed on Dual Pane file managers though. I used them on Windows from Windows 3 onwards and various macOS ones except the writers of the macOS ones had nice early versions then decided to rewrite to provide memory hogs that stopped working - e.g. Cocoatech Pathfinder - It is simple just a file browser don't keep adding stuff.
That's how I see these files. And maybe one day, we can have and edit our own .gitignore -like files for such Inattentional blindness[0].
[0]: Inattentional blindness