I prefer openat(2) and friends for dealing with ADS. It means you have to have specialized programs to deal with them from shell scripts, as open(2) and friends provide no naming conventions for getting at ADS. This approach is much much safer than the WIN32 approach of using :$HACK_ME_PLEASE and :$THANK_YOU_MAY_I_HAVE_ANOTHER.
Note that Linux has openat(2), but it doesn't support ADS. Solaris/Illumos does. Linux has xattrs, which, like ADS in Solaris/Illumos, requires separate system calls to access -- no open(2) naming conventions there.
Both, ADS and xattrs are extremely useful. Let's say you need to associate some metadata with a file, but you can't change its contents' format. You could use some separate file that goes with it, but now you can't atomically rename(2) the thing... But with ADS/xattrs you just attach those to the file, and then when you rename(2) the file the ADS/xattrs go with it atomically. (Yes, you could rename a directory, but it doesn't quite have the same semantics as renaming a file. In particular, rename(2) of a directory won't rm -rf the target if it exists.)
These little sins are truly terrible.
I prefer openat(2) and friends for dealing with ADS. It means you have to have specialized programs to deal with them from shell scripts, as open(2) and friends provide no naming conventions for getting at ADS. This approach is much much safer than the WIN32 approach of using :$HACK_ME_PLEASE and :$THANK_YOU_MAY_I_HAVE_ANOTHER.
Note that Linux has openat(2), but it doesn't support ADS. Solaris/Illumos does. Linux has xattrs, which, like ADS in Solaris/Illumos, requires separate system calls to access -- no open(2) naming conventions there.
Both, ADS and xattrs are extremely useful. Let's say you need to associate some metadata with a file, but you can't change its contents' format. You could use some separate file that goes with it, but now you can't atomically rename(2) the thing... But with ADS/xattrs you just attach those to the file, and then when you rename(2) the file the ADS/xattrs go with it atomically. (Yes, you could rename a directory, but it doesn't quite have the same semantics as renaming a file. In particular, rename(2) of a directory won't rm -rf the target if it exists.)