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Why? seems like a bad idea
Authored by: kikjou on Jul 21, '03 01:17:46PM

There are a few reasons why you may want to strip the resource fork.
(1) Web mail: Yahoo and others will display two files with the same name if you send an attached Word document. The user will be unable to open either of them and they will whine to you about your badly formatted email (while in reality Yahoo is doing a bad job reading AppleDouble-encoded attachments).
(2) Space saver: Thumbnails (icons) are cute but they add a few bytes to your file. Just have a folder with hundreds GIFs of 1 kByte or less each (such as those used for web pages) and now create icons for all of them. You have just used 2-3 times more hard disk space. On another note: MacOS X now creates thumbnails on the fly by reading the data fork.
(3) About loss of meta information: yes, you will lose the type and creator (although they are not stored in the resource fork but rather in the HFS directory structure. But, again, if you have MacOSX configured right and if you use those aweful three-letter suffixes, you should be more than fine. You will also lose other meta information such as the hidden bit and the hide-extension bit.
So, if you do not use file suffixes (extensions) and if you love your thumbnails (icons), don't mess with the cp command.



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