man getfattr – Man page for getfattr

June 1, 2007 – 1:20 am

GETFATTR

Section: File Utilities (1)
Updated: Extended Attributes
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NAME

getfattr – get extended attributes of filesystem objects

SYNOPSIS



getfattr [–hRLP] –n name [–e en] pathname…

getfattr [–hRLP] –d [–e en] [–m pattern] pathname…

DESCRIPTION

For each file,
getfattr

displays the file name,
and the set of extended attribute names (and optionally values) which
are associated with that file.

The output format of
getfattr –d

is as follows:



 1:  # file: somedir/

 2:  user.name0="value0"

 3:  user.name1="value1"

 4:  user.name2="value2"

 5:  …

Line 1 identifies the file name for which the
following lines are being reported.
The remaining lines (lines 2 to 4 above) show the
name

and
value

pairs associated with the specified file.

OPTIONS

–n name, ––name=name

Dump the value of the named extended attribute extended attribute.

–d, ––dump

Dump the values of all extended attributes associated with
pathname.

–e en, ––encoding=en

Encode values after retrieving them.
Valid values of
en

are "text", "hex", and "base64".
Values encoded as text strings are enclosed in double quotes ("),
while strings encoded as hexidecimal and base64 are prefixed with
0x and 0s, respectively.

–h, ––no–dereference

Do not follow symlinks.
If
pathname

is a symbolic link, the symbolic link itself is examined,
rather than the file the link refers to.

–m pattern, ––match=pattern

Only include attributes with names matching the regular expression
pattern.

The default value for
pattern

is "^user\\.",
–m

which includes all the attributes in the user namespace.
Refer to
attr(5)

for a more detailed discussion on namespaces.

––absolute–names

Do not strip leading slash characters (‘/’).
The default behaviour is to strip leading slash characters.

––only–values

Dump out the extended attribute value(s) only.

–R, ––recursive

List the attributes of all files and directories recursively.

–L, ––logical

Logical walk, follow symbolic links.
The default behaviour is to follow symbolic link arguments, and to
skip symbolic links encountered in subdirectories.

–P, ––physical