A Note About Resource Forks

    The resource fork of a file is a database of resources. As with any information stored in a database, there is no guarantee that the information in the resource fork is laid out in any particular order. Hence it possible for two files to contain the exact same resources and appear to be different during the kind of byte-by-byte comparison of the resource forks used in a search for duplicate files, and as a result two files could be reported as being different when functionally they are the same. This should not come up very often in practice, but it is possible.
    As mentioned in the description of the process for finding duplicate files, a duplicate file search based on resource fork contents reads the resource fork as a stream of bytes and creates a digital signature for each file. It is not feasible to modify this process to create such a digital signature that would be independent of the layout of the information in the resource fork.

 


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