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by donatj 1928 days ago
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but macOS still has resource forks, right?

My understanding is that's where file tags, file comments and custom file icons are stored.

2 comments

Maybe, but Mac APIs don't use them, so you can't mod your games with ResEdit anymore.

NTFS also has multiple forks, and also has many of the same fancy attributes capabilities that made the BeOS filesystem (in)famous, but they're not used in the same way, so it's kind of moot.

What really what made BeOS and Mac OS good was not so much the technical underpinnings, but the way they exposed these in the APIs and standard applications.

The power of Unix isn't just from the presence of the standard I/O routines, but the fact that most programmes are written to adhere to a specific paradigm that allow them to work together.

It has extended attributes instead. You can look at them with `xattr -l /path/to/file`. Tags go into `com.apple.FinderInfo`, and resource forks are, predictably, `com.apple.ResourceFork`, though they're probably still stored in a format classic Mac OS understands.