| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | VERSIONS | CONFORMING TO | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
GETXATTR(2) Linux Programmer's Manual GETXATTR(2)
getxattr, lgetxattr, fgetxattr - retrieve an extended attribute value
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <attr/xattr.h>
ssize_t getxattr(const char *path, const char *name,
void *value, size_t size);
ssize_t lgetxattr(const char *path, const char *name,
void *value, size_t size);
ssize_t fgetxattr(int fd, const char *name,
void *value, size_t size);
Extended attributes are name:value pairs associated with inodes (files,
directories, symbolic links, etc.). They are extensions to the normal
attributes which are associated with all inodes in the system (i.e., the
stat(2) data). A complete overview of extended attributes concepts can be
found in attr(5).
getxattr() retrieves the value of the extended attribute identified by name
and associated with the given path in the file system. The length of the
attribute value is returned.
lgetxattr() is identical to getxattr(), except in the case of a symbolic link,
where the link itself is interrogated, not the file that it refers to.
fgetxattr() is identical to getxattr(), only the open file referred to by fd
(as returned by open(2)) is interrogated in place of path.
An extended attribute name is a simple null-terminated string. The name
includes a namespace prefix; there may be several, disjoint namespaces
associated with an individual inode. The value of an extended attribute is a
chunk of arbitrary textual or binary data of specified length.
An empty buffer of size zero can be passed into these calls to return the
current size of the named extended attribute, which can be used to estimate
the size of a buffer which is sufficiently large to hold the value associated
with the extended attribute.
The interface is designed to allow guessing of initial buffer sizes, and to
enlarge buffers when the return value indicates that the buffer provided was
too small.
On success, a positive number is returned indicating the size of the extended
attribute value. On failure, -1 is returned and errno is set appropriately.
If the named attribute does not exist, or the process has no access to this
attribute, errno is set to ENOATTR.
If the size of the value buffer is too small to hold the result, errno is set
to ERANGE.
If extended attributes are not supported by the file system, or are disabled,
errno is set to ENOTSUP.
The errors documented for the stat(2) system call are also applicable here.
These system calls have been available on Linux since kernel 2.4; glibc
support is provided since version 2.3.
These system calls are Linux-specific.
getfattr(1), setfattr(1), listxattr(2), open(2), removexattr(2), setxattr(2),
stat(2), attr(5), symlink(7)
This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2001-12-01 GETXATTR(2)
HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface