Resource forks are a strange beast, while Apple started moving away from them (around 10.4) and migrated to HFS Attributes, software like Adobe’s Photoshop still save (can be disabled in Preferences > File Handling) file previews as resource forks, here is a refresher on how to view, find and delete resource forks.
You can see is a file has a resource fork in a number of ways (they all involve the terminal)
1- see if the file has a “com.apple.ResourceFork” extended attribute
xattr /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension
2- lookup the attributes of the resource fork directly
ls -l@ /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension
ls -ila /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension/..namedfork/rsrc
File system operations can be performed on a resource fork just like any other file so you can copy or delete them, to get a path to the resource fork you add /..namedfork/rsrc to the full path of the file in question, for example to copy then remove the fork:
cp /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension/..namedfork/rsrc ~/Desktop/thefork.rsrc
rm /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension/..namedfork/rsrc
You can also delete the fork by removing the extended attribute
xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension
Or print a hex dump of the actual data in the fork
xattr -l com.apple.ResourceFork /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname/filename.extension
You can find all the files that have resource forks with this terminal command :
find / -type f -exec test -s {}/..namedfork/rsrc ; -print
Now if you were to combine the last two you could delete all resource forks (in a given type of files under a certain path) e.g.:
find /Volumes/Volumename/Dirname -type f -name “*.extension” -exec test -s {}/..namedfork/rsrc ; -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork
NOTES:
Messing around with/deleting resource forks should be pretty safe nowadays, they were the mechanism used in Snow Leopard for storing HFS compressed files but this has been removed altogether in Lion.
The actual file as we know it is referred to as the data fork in this context and there used to be a way to get to it with /..namedfork/data but that does not appear to work anymore, if anyone can clarify please comment.
If you want to really dig into the gory details of your filesystem or maybe are in the unfortunate predicament of having to recover lost data i strongly recommend fileXray by Amit Singh, writer of the Mac OS X Internals book.
