I had the chance to fool with a network of Macs running OSX today. It's a
pretty cool setup. There are a few areas where the GUI seems to be at war
with the underlying UNIX but it's just so cool to have sshd running on
every client in the place.

There are a few oddball things I'd like to ask about. The "resource fork"
thing...I guess these are just extended attributes, but how do you get
at them? There's this funny little program "ditto" that can copy the
attributes along with the file however it (of course) doesn't work over
scp. Is there any way to extract these things into a file and then to
reapply them to another file? Something like:

$ rfattr --extract foo -o foo.rf
$ scp foo foo.rf barney:/home/booboo/foo
$ ssh barney
$ cd ~booboo
$ rfattr --commit foo -i foo.rf

where foo.rf would be the file where the resource fork would be saved to
and foo is just some file.

Another thing I was wondering about I ran into in my brief (and I hope
misguided) quest to transfer resource forks over the network. I attempted
to get a local loopback file system to transfer the resource fork to a-la
ditto and found hdiutil. I made a local image filesystem, mounted it,
dittoed over the files I wanted to copy, unmounted it, transfered it over
the network and upon attempting to remount got an error. I
tried a few things but error continued.

Eventually I went over to the terminal I was trying to mount on and found
that there was no one there. I logged in and the file mounted fine. I
unmounted it and went back to my system and found that it would mount from
the other end. I guess to mount image files the GUI has to be running for
some strange reason?

A network of these systems with a few unix servers would be a joy to work
on. I was never big on Macs before today but I think I could be if I had
some time to learn them properly.

Sean

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 04:47:30 +0000, Sean wrote:

>
> There are a few oddball things I'd like to ask about. The "resource fork"
> thing...I guess these are just extended attributes, but how do you get
> at them? There's this funny little program "ditto" that can copy the
>

....

> Eventually I went over to the terminal I was trying to mount on and found
> that there was no one there. I logged in and the file mounted fine. I
> unmounted it and went back to my system and found that it would mount from
> the other end. I guess to mount image files the GUI has to be running for
> some strange reason?
>

I was talking with some people on IRC and they said that the OS X version
of tar will store and restore resource attributes automatically.

Also they said that the problem with mounting/attach attaching images on a
machine that hasn't been logged into through the console (locally) can be
fixed as so:

% disktool -c 501
% hdiutil mount newprogram.dmg

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...&query=hdiutil