IIUC, examples of these advanced file systems would be Apple's and Microsoft's latest offerings. I think Apple started it first, but has totally disabled it except what's needed to support pre-X files. Microsoft doesn't need it at all, but has it fully enabled! (I've read that this decision has resulted in some security bloopers. For example, someone could look at an empty file in his/her text editor and wonder why it takes up so much disk space, not knowing that the data was placed in a custom fork and an old text editor can't recognize that.)
Does any Unix(-like) system support this idea, besides Mac OS X? I've heard that Linux was experimenting with this. Obviously, any non-advanced file system could be supported with any new APIs we make; just assume that the file system supports only one fork (with an empty name?).
Hi, Apple and MS call this feature, multiple streams file, so could use that name too :-) Apple did it first, and MS copy it (actually, improved it a lot.) and MS does use it, never wonder where the author field from each file came from? Anyway, you can generate and open each stream as a separated file, if you want to read foo, stream bar, just open foo::bar. My 0.02 pesos Lucas/