TB wrote

Which sort of begs the question "whats the difference between a directory containing several files of different types and a file containing several different named streams.

On the face of it, the idea of alternate streams as explained above (one of GF's links) does not map onto a heirarchy. Come to think of it, I'm now wondering if VMS doesn't do something like you are describing with journaling (for those who don't know, a VMS filename looks like FILENAME.EXT;2 - if you leave off the numeric qualifier it opens the most recent one). This is more or less a wonderful feature but tends to get abused - lots of garbage files - but results in automatically redundant logs.

So, this doesn't seem to be the same as a "true" directory structure as in UNIX. The big advantage with UNIX emphasis on single streams is that it is easy to graft them here and there - redirection. Alternate streams would enormously complicate redirection, to the point of introducing too much complex overhead for a few happy plus points (even, as with VMS versioning, they are excellent).

Anyway, UNIX has this funny business with names in the form of hard links.