[ale] ls command output

Chris Ricker kaboom at gatech.edu
Tue Jan 21 00:08:08 EST 2003


On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Danny Cox wrote:

> Chris,
> 
> On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 18:57, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > XFS doesn't support the extended attributes, so lsattr should've failed....
> 
> 	Uh, yes it does.  In fact, ACLs are implemented on top of extended
> attributes.
> 
> 	Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes, but the extended attributes
> that XFS implements are of the form NAME=attribute.  The size of NAME,
> while limited is very large (4096 bytes?).

Naw, we're just talking about totally different critters that happen to have
the same name. The original poster was presumably talking about the ext2 /
ext3 extended attributes (immutable files, append-only files, journalled
files, synchronous files, etc.) since he was using lsattr. XFS does not
support those. They're ext2 / ext3 (and future ReiserFS releases) only.

The stuff you're talking about (the attr / getfattr / setfattr stuff) is
also known as extended attributes, and it's also available for ext2 / ext3,
where it's also the basis of ACL implementations. Experimental ReiserFS
patches of it are available as well....

> The size of NAME, while limited is very large (4096 bytes?).  The size of
> attribute is limited only by the available space on the fs,

My understanding is that the limits are 256 bytes for the name, and 64 kb
for the attribute. However, on XFS, the total number of attributes you can
attach to a single file is limited only by available space (which is much
better than ext2 / ext3, where they all have to fit in a single block).

later,
chris
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