metadata query - help needed

[mah at jump-ing.de (Markus Hitter)]

Am 03.03.2004 um 20:58 schrieb Nicholas Riley:

> I believe the Mac OS X installer uses some kludge to get around pax's 
> lack of support for
> resource forks and Mac-specific file metadata.

It uses /Developer/Tools/SplitForks to spawn metadata and resources 
into a ._file. Same can be achieved if you copy your folder onto an UFS 
Volume using the Finder. This tool is part of Developer Tools.

At installation time, /System/Library/CoreServices/FixupResouceForks 
assembles them again, if appropriate. This tool is available on any OS 
X installation.

The same combination can copy file trees from the command line as well. 
hfstar (thanks, Fabien) appears to be the simples choice for HFS -> HFS 
copying, though.


Sad to say, there are about 10 different flavours of mapping Mac OS 
metadata onto flat file systems. The new ability of Panthers Finder to 
make zip archives invented yet another one:

Nobile:~$ unzip -l /Network/Users/mah/Pictures/Picture.jpg.zip
Archive:  /Network/Users/mah/Pictures/Picture.jpg.zip
  Length    Date    Time    Name
  ------    ----    ----    ----
   29257  09-22-100  00:16   Picture.jpg
       0  03-03-104  21:42   __MACOSX/
      82  09-22-100  00:16   __MACOSX/._Picture.jpg
  ------                    -------
   29339                    3 files

A Finder zip archive should copy correctly as well.



Markus


P.S.: "cp file/rsrc ..." doesn't copy Finder info. You need a "cp 
file/fndr ..." as well.

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/