From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:48:16 +0000 From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <46C61B21.67B15E89@null.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <46C4E86C.CD73F5D@null.net>, <13426df10708170600u40bd2dcat14f02aa7c192fb0e@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] everything is a directory Topicbox-Message-UUID: ac47941a-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 ron minnich wrote: > On 8/17/07, Douglas A. Gwyn wrote: > > What do you mean by "extended attributes"? > > I haven't noticed them on the Unix systems I use. > maybe I'm missing the question, but on my linux: > man -k extended | grep attrib | wc > 21 183 1417 On Solaris 8 there is only one line, for user_attr(4), which pertains to users, not to files. However, on Solaris 10 it turns up fsattr(5), which seems to be the feature under discussion. The Solaris 10 manual page for fsattr(5) describes nicely how to access the attribute information, but it fails to explain why one would want to use that feature in the first place. > it's everywhere. But it was too hard to put in in some normal way, so > it went in from the side. At least on Solaris 10, there is an openat() syscall that opens the attributes as a normal fd starting at the (possibly ordinary) fd supplied as an argument, which acts "sort of" like a current-working-directory. I'm still wondering what the motivation was.