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AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 179.111.216.158 (talk) at 18:53, 12 April 2018 (macOS -> Mac OS X (reverted someone else's change). Two reasons: External references that make up the article refer to it by that name, and because "Mac OS" is already being used to refer to the original Mac OS operating system in this article, so it's important to make it clearer which one is being referenced in each context. Furthermore, despite the recent rebranding, internally the OS source code still refers to itself as "Mac OS X", even on High Sierra.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

AppleSingle Format and AppleDouble Format are file formats developed by Apple Computer to store Mac OS "dual-forked" files on the Unix filesystem being used in A/UX, the Macintosh platform's first Unix-like operating system. AppleSingle combined both file forks and the related Finder meta-file information into a single file, whereas AppleDouble stored them as two separate files. Support for the formats was later added to Unix software such as NFS and MAE, but they saw little use outside this small market.

AppleSingle is similar in concept to the more popular MacBinary format, in that the resource and data forks are combined together with a header containing the Finder information. In fact, the format is so similar, it seemed there were no reason why Apple did not simply use MacBinary instead, which by that point, was widely known and used. Some not-so-obvious reasons are explained in an Internet Draft.[1] The format was later assigned the MIME type application/applefile.

AppleDouble leaves the data fork in its original format, allowing it to be edited by normal Unix utilities. The resource fork and Finder information, both proprietary and lacking editors under Unix, were combined into a second file. A MIME type was also assigned to AppleDouble, multipart/appledouble. For sending to an AppleDouble un-aware system, the file was generally encoded using Base64, as opposed to being converted to AppleSingle.

Before Mac OS X, AppleSingle and Double had little presence in the Mac market, due largely to the small market share of A/UX. Nevertheless, they did force various file compression vendors to add support for the formats, and confuse future MacBinary versions.

Mac OS X revived the use of AppleDouble; on file systems such as NFS and WebDAV that don't natively support resource forks, Finder information, or extended attributes, that information is stored in AppleDouble format, with the second file having a name generated by prepending "._" to the name of the first file (thus, this information acts as a hidden file when viewed from a non-Apple Unix-based operating system).

Unwanted "._" files can be removed using dot_clean -m on Mac OS X.

References

  1. ^ http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-newman-macbin-binhex-harmful-00
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