Using Extended Attributes to Tag Files

Posted23 days agoActive23 days ago

alance

2 points

1 comments

alexlance.blogTech Discussionstory

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Documentation ManagementExtended AttributesTagging Systems

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Documentation Management

Extended Attributes

Tagging Systems

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Discussion (1 comments)

Showing 5 comments

alanceAuthor

23 days ago

1 reply

My recent journey sorting through years of files and categorizing/tagging them with the built-in Extended File Attribute functionality.

karmakaze

23 days ago

1 reply

I've lost extended attributes of files on a number of systems because they aren't always included by default in file operations. I don't trust everything that could possibly write/update a file to preserve them, nor do I trust myself from archiving without using the right options in a hurry.

alanceAuthor

23 days ago

Yes concerning. The possibility of losing them between filesystems is worrying too.

One rule of thumb is `mv` will keep the attributes by default (given similar filesystem) and everything else needs tweaking/extra args. There's a section on it over here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes#Preserv...

sureglymop

23 days ago

1 reply

So you're telling me my size 0 file may unknowingly be a large key/value db? Neat.

The system call to read these attributes is getxattr(), for anyone curious.

alanceAuthor

23 days ago

Ha, it suddenly sounds like trouble.

Eg: one could piggy-back an entirely new file onto an existing file (it might have to be text encoded?).

It looks like the kernel might impose a limit of 64KiB on a file's metadata, but that's still quite a lot of room for data smuggling...

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ID: 46227357Type: storyLast synced: 12/11/2025, 6:36:19 AM

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