Distinguishing Marks
In System 7 through Mac OS 9, aliases distinguished themselves visually to the user by the fact that their file names were in italics. To accommodate languages that don't have italics (such as Japanese), in Mac OS 8.5 another distinguishing mark was added, badging with an "alias arrow" - a black arrow with a small white border - similar to that used for shortcuts in Microsoft Windows.
In OS X, the filenames of aliases are not italicized, but the arrow badge remains.
Alias files start with the magic number 62 6F 6F 6B 00 00 00 00 6D 61 72 6B 00 00 00 00 which is "book\0\0\0\0mark\0\0\0\0".
Read more about this topic: Alias (Mac OS)
Famous quotes containing the word marks:
“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there.... These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)