[RFE] --reference option for setfattr

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Monday, 22 December 2008 14:01:03 Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 10:50:58AM +0100, Ales Zelinka wrote:
> > currently when I want to copy all extended attributes from one file to
> > another, I have to use ugly command like this:
> >
> > getfattr --dump -m '-' /etc/samba/smb.conf |sed 's;file:
> > etc/samba/smb.conf;file: /tmp/smb.conf;'| setfattr --restore=-
> >
> > Would you please implement --reference=some_file option that will read
> > all extended attributes set on some_file and set them on pathname?
> >
> > The previous use case would then look like this:
> >
> > setfattr --reference=/etc/samba/smb.conf /tmp/smb.conf
> >
> > Other commands from file-attributes-manipulation familly already have
> > parameter like this (chmod, chown, chcon,...)
>
> This feature seems useful to me, any chance you could try coming up with
> a patch?

getfattr/setfattr are modeled similar to getfacl/setfacl, and with those two 
tools you can do this (-b stands for --remove-all):

	getfacl /etc/samba/smb.conf | setfacl -b -M - /tmp/smb.conf

Would it make sense to implement this in setfattr in a similar way?
A -b option would be handy in this context as well, of course.

But maybe --reference is more convenient sometimes, and so it should be added 
in any case?

Thanks,
Andreas