This article explains Mac OS X's Extended Attributes and the command line utility xattr.
So, i was working on OS X again. ( OS X 10.6)
When i do ls -l, i noticed the “@” sign. Example:
-rw-rw-r--@ 1 _www admin 1046505 Nov 10 2007 collection.jpg
What the f��� is that? 10 years working in unixes, i haven't seen that before. So, some web search found me: Extended file attributes, and the new command-line utility “xattr”.
Summary:
Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
Extended file attributes is a file system feature that enables 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 can be storing the author of a document, the character encoding of a plain-text document, or a checksum.
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 the Mac OS imposes any limit on the number of extended attributes. Each attribute is denoted by a name and the associated data. The name is a null-terminated Unicode string. The Mac OS X APIs support listing, getting, setting, and removing extended attributes from files or directories. The xattr utility may be used from the Terminal as well.
Apple also made some changes to “ls”. When you do a ls -l on a file, if the file has extended attributes, it'll display a “@” sign. You can also use ls -l -@ filename to show extended attributes. Example:
-rw-rw-r--@ 1 _www admin 1046505 Nov 10 2007 collection.jpg
Here's a quote from man ls:
If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information (such as an access control list), the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '+' character.
There's no man page for xattr, but xattr -h gives a usage summary:
usage: xattr [-l] [-r] [-v] [-x] file [file ...]
xattr -p [-l] [-r] [-v] [-x] attr_name file [file ...]
xattr -w [-r] [-v] [-x] attr_name attr_value file [file ...]
xattr -d [-r] [-v] attr_name file [file ...]
The first form lists the names of all xattrs on the given file(s).
The second form (-p) prints the value of the xattr attr_name.
The third form (-w) sets the value of the xattr attr_name to the string attr_value.
The fourth form (-d) deletes the xattr attr_name.
options:
-h: print this help
-r: act recursively
-l: print long format (attr_name: attr_value and hex output has offsets and
ascii representation)
-v: also print filename (automatic with -r and with multiple files)
-x: attr_value is represented as a hex string for input and output
vmm:vmm xahlee$
Extended Attributes are name/value pairs. The names are Unicode characters of less than 128 bytes. (they are probably encoded in utf-8 or utf-16) The values can be text or binary, recommended to be less than 4 kibibit.
There's no standardize structure for names. Anyone can add a attribute named for example “xyz” to a particular file. Apple recommends the use of reverse DNS naming scheme to prevent name clash. This is the same scheme adopted by Java. Example:
com.apple.FinderInfo
If you have a domain name, such as “example.com” then your attribute name for file of author can be “com.example.author”. If you don't have a domain name, just make sure the name is not likely used by others.