2013-07-26 20:28:10

by Colin Walters

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Subject: Need for llistxattrat()/lgetxattrat()/lsetxattrat()

Hi,

So at the moment the kernel has pretty comprehensive support for the
*at() variants of file API calls, and at one point I was rewriting my
app to be a modern Unix citizen and use the *at variants, but I ran into
one admittedly obscure corner case, which is the lack of API calls to
manipulate the extended attributes of symbolic links relative to a
dirfd.

Correctly handling xattrs (in particular, SELinux labels) is a key part
of my application, so for now I'll just live with pathnames and their
drawbacks, but:

Is this intentional or an oversight? If the latter, should I try a
patch?