On 5 Sep 2006, at 07:47, Yvon Thoraval wrote:

> Le 4 sept. 06 ? 20:43, Paul Lynch a ?crit :
>
>> MacOS X follows legacy Macintosh glitches to its detriment,  
>> sometimes.  HFS+ supports forked files, and fonts, for legacy  
>> reasons, put their real data in the invisible data fork.  eg:
>>
>> ls -l /Library/Fonts/Arial
>> -rw-rw-r--   1 root  admin  0 Mar 20  2005 /Library/Fonts/Arial
>>
>> ls -l /Library/Fonts/Arial/rsrc
>> -rw-rw-r--   1 root  admin  317313 Mar 20  2005 /Library/Fonts/ 
>> Arial/rsrc
>
> ah OK, fine thanxs !
>
> but in this case why ls doesn't see a directory, ie i'd have seen  
> rather :
>
>> drw-rw-r--   1 root  admin  0 Mar 20  2005 /Library/Fonts/Arial
> --^---- directory isn't it ?

Because it isn't a directory, it's a forked file.  A file can have  
many forks, and rsrc is just some sort of alias to the "resource"  
fork.  A directory would have rather different behaviour from a  
forked file, and overloading the path notation was thought to be the  
best way to handle it.  It's a no-win situation when you think about it.

Paul