icns-analysis

MacOS .icns collection

Download files from archive.org and place in this directory.

A note on Resource Forks

Classic Macintosh store icon files in Resource Forks. You can access this data by appending the following path suffix:

cat ./{file}/..namedfork/rsrc

Resource Fork Icon Usage

Not all .icns files in this folder are actual icns files. The _src.txt shows the full path from where the icon was extracted. Paths which end on suffix {file}.rsrc/*/*.icns, were extracted from Resource Forks.

• If the path is .rsrc/icns/, then the file is a proper .icns file.
  => The Resource Fork did include the full icns file.
• If the path is .rsrc/{KEY}/ (where KEY is anything but “icns” – e.g., File.rsrc/h8mk/0.icns), then the data was artificially wrapped in an .icns container for display purposes.
  => The icon keys were scattered loosely in the Resource Fork. The icns container was not part of the original structure.

Technically, the latter should not be considered for the icns file format because they were never part of an icns-file.

This affects mostly old macOS versions (OS 7 – 9) as newer versions seem to avoid Resource Forks.

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