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Concept
Resource fork
Summary
The resource fork is a of a on Apple's classic Mac OS operating system, which was also carried over to the modern macOS for compatibility, used to store structured data along with the unstructured data stored within the data fork.
A resource fork stores information in a specific form, containing details such as icon bitmaps, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and application code (machine code). For example, a word processing file might store its text in the data fork, while storing any embedded images in the same file's resource fork. The resource fork is used mostly by executables, but every file is able to have a resource fork.
In a 1986 technical note, Apple strongly recommended that developers do not put general data into the resource fork of a file. According to Apple, there are parts of the system software that rely on resource forks having only valid Resource Manager information in them.
Originally conceived and implemented by programmer Bruce Horn, the resource fork was used for three purposes with :
It was used to store all graphical data on disk until it was needed, then retrieved, drawn on the screen, and thrown away. This software variant of virtual memory helped Apple to reduce memory requirements from 1 MB in the Apple Lisa to 128 KB in Macintosh.
Because all the pictures and text were stored separately in a resource fork, it could be used to allow a non-programmer to translate an application for a foreign market, a process called internationalization and localization.
It could be used to distribute nearly all of the components of an application in a single file, reducing clutter and simplifying application installation and removal.
The resource fork is implemented in all of the s used for system drives on the Macintosh (, and HFS Plus). The presence of a resource fork makes it easy to store a variety of additional information, such as allowing the system to display the correct icon for a file and open it without the need for a in the file name.
Official source
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