Re: extended attributes and lsextattr/extattr_list_file

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 11:59:21AM -0500, Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 09:06:13AM +0000, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> > It is easy to do the conversion so that our Linux-like listexattr() returns
> > NUL-separated strings, while our FreeBSD-like extattr_list_file() returns
> > one-byte length prefixed strings. The question is what should our vnode
> > interface (VOP_LISTEXTATTR) require? Linux-like format is also used 
> 
> Are attributes allowed to contain NUL bytes?  I can imagine using this for 
> arbitrary binary data (e.g. just to pick an arbitrary example: raw md5 sums),
> so it seems like it would be nice to support that.
> If we want to support that, NUL separated strings certainly won't work.
> 

From extattr(9):
"The semantics of this additional data is ... zero or more bytes of arbitrary
 binary data."

eric