Unexpected file modifications on external exFAT SSD

Question

After moving an external drive from

I have a 1TB external SSD with a single exFAT partition. I plugged this into Mac OS X and write about 250GB worth of files. File contents seem normal. After safely ejecting the drive, and plugging it into an Ubuntu 14.04 system with exfat-fuse and exfat-utils installed, the drive mounts successfully and I can see the files. However, many of the files now have extra data both appended and prepended. For example:

On Mac OS X:

$ cat bootstrap.bash
build/soong/bootstrap.bash 

On Ubuntu:

$ cat bootstrap.bash
XSym
0026
b6fcaef0c9993fb6d1312e1d5e1749ef
build/soong/bootstrap.bash (Note: Tons of whitespace here...)

This has happened to thousands of files. Prefixed with XSym, a 4-digit number, and then what appears to be a hash (MD5 perhaps?). After the file contents, a large amount of space characters.

Another example:

$ cat build/envsetup.sh
XSym
0016
44d14bb79b8bd36de18d71e0498a4a19
make/envsetup.sh

EDIT: The affected files may all be symlinks

I'm looking at this to see if it answers my question...

Answer 1

Answer found! These strange modifications are what Mac OS X chooses to do to represent symlinks on filesystems that do not natively support symlinks. Plugging the drive into any OS X results in these 'aliases' being resolved, but on Linux the exFAT driver does not interpret these files as symlinks, because the ExFAT filesystem standard does not support symlinks.

When trying to create a symlink on exfat using Ubuntu, the following error happens: ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘test/bootstrap.bash’: Function not implemented. If I were to copy the entire external drive contents onto a different filesystem which supported symlinks, then I could use something like the answers shown here to try and locate all of these mac os x workarounds and resolve them. That's no good for my purposes, so back to using a different filesystem