[ale] File Comments

[aaron]

On Monday 24 June 2002 07:53, Danny Cox wrote:
> Aaron,
>
> On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 22:26, aaron wrote:
> > One of the many nice little features of the Amiga systems I use is
> > the FILE COMMENT field in the file system [...]
> > 	<snip>
> > I guess I'm just trying to be certain I haven't been seriously
> > overlooking something for the past decade... so is anyone aware of a
> > File Comment / File Descriptor facility in any of the *nix file
> > systems [?]

> Any filesystem that has extended attributes could handle that.  XFS is
> one.  Ext3 MAY have it.  ACLs are sometimes (usually?) implemented as
> extended attributes.
>
> 	XFS, with which I'm more familiar, can have as many EAs as you wish.
> They consist of a name ("COMMENT"), which has a maximum size, but very
> large, something like 255 bytes, and the value, which may be anything
> (even binary).  The value also has a fixed size, but much larger, on
> the order of 4096 bytes.

Thanks for the info and references. The possibilities suggested here 
pointed me where I needed to look.

>From what I could gather, the "standard" linux ext2 / ext3  systems don't 

seem to allow for the "file comment" idea. They do have some "extended 
attributes" as you mentioned, but (yes) those elements seem limited to 
data elements for the Access Control Lists.

However, as you suggested, SGI's Open XFS apears to support what I'm 
looking for (or could  be set to do so) via extendable "Extended 
Attributes";  The XFS file system is shipping with current Mandrake, Suse 
and a few other distributions,  but oddly (and unfortunately), not with 
Red Hat as yet.

The Open XFS site lists a RedHat 7.2 ISO, but I'm not sure want muck 
about with my low level file systems for this one non-critical feature.  
I think I'll wait for XFS to just gain a little broader acceptance and 
try it out the next time I do a distro update.

Again, thanks for the info.

peace
aaron

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