[Way Off Topic] Re: Uploading problem with Macs

[Eric Dobbs <er...@dobbse.net>]

Sorry for the off-topic post, but this needs correcting for the 
archive...
(if anyone has more questions about this, email me privately and spare 
the list more noise)

On Monday, November 26, 2001, at 11:48  PM, Terry McBride wrote:

> For the archives and anyone else interested,
>
> IE for Mac apparently sends files in Macbinary format.
> Macbinary files are comprised of two parts: resource
> forks and data forks.  The suggestion seems to be
> removing the resource fork which is info about the
> file, image preview, other stuff.

Actually, it is the Mac OS file system (in all versions before OS X) 
which stores files in a resource fork and a data fork.  That's the 
native structure for files in Mac OS.  The problem is that the rest of 
the file systems in the world cannot handle both forks of a Mac file 
(which is probably why Mac OS X now uses "bundles" instead of the two 
forks -- but I digress).  Macbinary is a packaging technique (vaguely 
like tar and zip) which will encode both forks into a one fork file 
which can be safely stored on another non-Mac file system.

Typically, files uploaded from a Mac get encoded in MacBinary or BinHex 
formats.  They can then be safely stored on a unix or other system.  
When a Mac user downloads the encoded files from that system, they get 
decoded automagically into the native format by the client software (IE 
or whatever).  It works fine when going Mac OS to something else back to 
Mac OS.  No problems if the non-mac system is just storing the files.  
But if the files need to be processed by the backend, that's when you 
have to deal with the encoding and the multiple forks.

The resource fork is where the compiled code for applications are 
stored.  There are also some meta data stored there (signatures for the 
application that created the file, and file type, icon information and 
the like).  If your users are not uploading applications, then it should 
be fairly safe for you to ignore the resource fork.

I have never had to mess with any of this stuff, so I don't think I can 
help with your specific problem.  Hopefully this background information 
will help you figure it out.

-Eric

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