AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats

AppleSingle Format and AppleDouble Format are file formats developed by Apple Computer to store Mac OS "dual-forked" files on the Unix filesystem being used in A/UX, the Macintosh platform's first Unix-like operating system. AppleSingle combined both file forks and the related Finder meta-file information into a single file, whereas AppleDouble stored them as two separate files. Support for the formats was later added to Unix software such as NFS and MAE, but they saw little use outside this small market.

AppleSingle is similar in concept to the more popular MacBinary format, in that the resource and data forks are combined together with a header containing the Finder information. In fact, the format is so similar there is no obvious reason why Apple did not simply use MacBinary instead, which by that point was widely known and used. Some not-so-obvious reasons are explained in http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-newman-macbin-binhex-harmful-00. The format was later assigned the MIME type application/applefile.