High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The resource fork is a construct of the Mac OS operating system used to store structured data in a file, alongside unstructured data stored within the data fork. A resource fork stores information in a specific form, such as icons, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and application code (machine code). For example, a word processing file might store its text in the data fork, while storing any embedded images in the same file`s resource fork. The resource fork is used mostly by executables, but every file is able to have a resource fork.