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by xyzzy_plugh 1682 days ago
Is this Copy-on-Write? Is the copy a real file or is this a filesystem implementation detail?
2 comments

The stationary feature has existed since the “Classic” days. Probably MacOS 7. So it comes from the HFS era.

It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.

Stationary pads were already implemented in the Lisa UI, but it took quite some time to show up in classic MacOS - https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198
APFS has CoW semantics, so I would assume it uses the APFS filesystem features.
I'm pretty sure that feature is older than OS X, let alone APFS. It might be implemented using CoW now, but it certainly hasn't always been.