attr vs. getfattr

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 08:01:06PM -0700, Christian Kujau wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2012 at 21:54, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > > I.e. "nothing" is printed. I understand there's "attr" specifically for 
> > > XFS filesystems and at least it displays that there *is* an attribute 
> > > stored, but it cannot get its value:
> > 
> > By default it's looking at the user namespace.  You want to look at security (or all) with -m:
> 
> Aaargh! Namespaces...yes, of course. Thanks for reminding me and sorry for 
> the noise.

I was recently bitten by this too, and I consider it a bug in the manpage.

       -d, --dump
           Dump  the  values  of all extended attributes associated with path‐
           name.

I'd say it's not unreasondable to read this and think that -d dumps *all*
extended attributes, because that's what it says.

Only if you read later do you find:

       -m pattern, --match=pattern
           Only include attributes with names matching the regular expression
           pattern.   The  default  value  for  pattern  is  "^user\\." ...

Regards,

Brian.