dlorde thankyou for the advice, you see i am programming a tool in JAVA that performs various functions related to ADS, such as get the file size and preview the data in an ADS but i have been unable to find a way to actually search a directory for ADS and show the results (i now know why).
I will not despair, there are some utilities that i know of which enumerate ADS in specified directories and ADS associated with specific files, one example is LADS.exe.

So, how would i go about executing an external program from within a JAVA program? can anyone give me a code example of this in action?

Thankyou guys for any help you might give, it is appreciated.