Extended file attributes

Extended file attributes are file system features that enable users to associate computer files with metadata not interpreted by the filesystem, whereas regular attributes have a purpose strictly defined by the filesystem (such as permissions or records of creation and modification times). Unlike forks, which can usually be as large as the maximum file size, extended attributes are usually limited in size to a value significantly smaller than the maximum file size. Typical uses include storing the author of a document, the character encoding of a plain-text document, or a checksum, cryptographic hash or digital certificate, and discretionary access control information. Extended file attributes are file system features that enable users to associate computer files with metadata not interpreted by the filesystem, whereas regular attributes have a purpose strictly defined by the filesystem (such as permissions or records of creation and modification times). Unlike forks, which can usually be as large as the maximum file size, extended attributes are usually limited in size to a value significantly smaller than the maximum file size. Typical uses include storing the author of a document, the character encoding of a plain-text document, or a checksum, cryptographic hash or digital certificate, and discretionary access control information. In AIX, the JFS2 v2 filesystem supports extended attributes, which are accessible using the getea command. The getea,, setea, listea, statea, and removeea APIs support fetching, setting, listing, getting information about, and removing extended attributes. Support for extended file attributes was removed from the OpenBSD source code in 2005 due to a lack of interest in Access Control Lists In FreeBSD 5.0 and later, the UFS1, UFS2, and ZFS filesystems support extended attributes, using the extattr_ family of system calls. Any regular file may have a list of extended attributes. Each attribute consists of a name and the associated data. The name must be a null-terminated string, and exists in a namespace identified by a small-integer namespace identifier. Currently, two namespaces exist: user and system. The user namespace has no restrictions with regard to naming or contents. The system namespace is primarily used by the kernel for access control lists and mandatory access control. In Linux, the ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, Squashfs, Yaffs2, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, Btrfs, OrangeFS, Lustre, OCFS2 1.6, ZFS, and F2FS filesystems support extended attributes (abbreviated xattr) when enabled in the kernel configuration. Any regular file or directory may have extended attributes consisting of a name and associated data. The name must be a null-terminated string prefixed by a namespace identifier and a dot character. Currently, four namespaces exist: user, trusted, security and system. The user namespace has no restrictions with regard to naming or contents. The system namespace is primarily used by the kernel for access control lists. The security namespace is used by SELinux, for example. Support for the extended attribute concept from a POSIX.1e draft that had been withdrawn in 1997 was added to Linux around 2002.As of 2016, they are not yet in widespread use by user-space Linux programs, but are used by Beagle, OpenStack Swift, Dropbox, KDE's semantic metadata framework (Baloo), Chromium, Wget and cURL. A set of recommendations for using them is available at freedesktop.org. The Linux kernel allows extended attribute to have names of up to 255 bytes and values of up to 64KiB,as do XFS and ReiserFS,but ext2/3/4 and btrfs impose much smaller limits, requiring all the attributes (names and values) of one file to fit in one 'filesystem block' (usually 4 KiB). Extended attributes can be accessed and modified using the attr, getfattr and setfattr commands from the attr package on most distributions. Mac OS X 10.4 and later support extended attributes by making use of the HFS+ filesystem Attributes file B*-tree feature which allows for named forks. Although the named forks in HFS+ support arbitrarily large amounts of data through extents, the OS support for extended attributes only supports inline attributes, limiting their size to that which can fit within a single B*-tree node. Any regular file may have a list of extended attributes. HFS+ supports an arbitrary number of named forks, and it is unknown if macOS imposes any limit on the number of extended attributes. Each attribute consists of a name and the associated data. The name is a null-terminated Unicode string.