Macintosh File

A Macintosh 

file

 has two forks: 

a

 data fork, which contains 

data

 (the same 

a

 files on other operating systems); 

and

 a 

resource fork

, which has other attributes such 

a

 menus, 

icon

, dialog boxes, formatting, 

and

 other 

code

.

In

 some methods of converting 

file

 for transfer (such 

a

 uuencoding), the 

resource fork

 of 

a

 Macintosh 

file

 is stripped off 

and

 only the 

data

 fork is sent.BinHex 

and

 MacBinary 

encoding

 preserve the 

resource fork

.