[X-Unix] What's in an MP3's resource fork..? [Was: Re: [X4U] ._annoying_files on SMB shares - can I remove them..?]

[Stroller]

On Apr 20, 2004, at 7:19 am, Jakob Peterhänsel wrote:
>
> Rest assured the .DS_Store is left by the Finder:
>
> 1: It's invisible (the .)
> 2: It's only containing info about how to display the enclosing folder.
>
> Resource forks from user files will be called ._<filename> if I 
> remember right.

Indeed. My apologies for the lack of clarity in my posting - it was 
late at night.

I wish to remove all non-essential "dot-files" left by Macs on Samba 
shares, as they're extremely irritating when viewed from Windows boxes. 
I frequently use Finder at my workstation to arrange directory 
structures of PC or cross-platform files stored on an SMB server, and 
when I subsequently burn those directories to disk I hate seeing the 
dot-files in there.

.DS_Store files are easy to identify, but I check them with `file`, 
anyway, just to check that neither a user nor my Linux distribution 
have decided to use that filename for something else.

The subsequent section of the script will deal with resource forks. I 
intend to use `find` locate all files with a filename beginning with ._ 
  and then `file` to determine that each of those is an "AppleDouble 
encoded Macintosh file". Then I'll remove all of them with a 
(case-insensitive) file suffix of .jpg, .jpeg, .mp3 (?), .png, and 
whatever other file types I can think of for which the resource fork is 
irrelevant.

There are definitely some file-types out there that use the resource 
fork, which as a relative newcomer to OS X I find extremely annoying, 
but I wish to preserve the resource fork when unsure. .textClipping is 
notable - I find it quite bizarre that a file format whose main use is 
to store plain text notes contains an empty data-fork and is restricted 
to the Mac platform. If the data fork of a .textClipping contained a 
copy of the text, then they could be usefully used cross-platform.

Stroller.