Download zap-res-forks-101.hqx (110,102 KB)
From: titan@indigo.ie
Subject: zap-res-forks-101.hqx
ZapResForks v1.0.1
© 1997 Richard Bannister
WARNING!
ZapResForks can irreversibly damage a file. The author disclaims all
responsibility for what you might do to your files using this program.
This program should only by used by people who have read this
documentation in full. Use this program at your own risk.
What does it do?
ZapResForks allows you to delete the resource fork from files quickly
and easily.
Erm, what's a resource fork?
MacOS files are made up of two parts - the resource fork and the data
fork. In general, the data fork is used mainly by documents (although
PowerPC native applications use it for code also). The resource fork is
where all the interface elements of applications are found, and the
680x0 code.
So why on earth would you want to delete a resource fork?
The main reason you might want to use a utility like this is when you
are putting together WWW pages in SimpleText. SimpleText is a handy
text-editor (you're probably using it right now to read this document),
but for some reason it always saves font/style information in a resource
fork, even if there is no style information for a document.
Now, the way files are stored on a disk means that one allocation block
is needed for the resource fork and one for the data fork. This can mean
that SimpleText files, less than 5K in actual size, can take up more
than 40K on disk on larger drives! Deleting the resource fork from
SimpleText files will delete any style information that is there -
saving one allocation block from the disk. On my 1.2Gb hard disk, that
amounts to 19K saved per file.