CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxfilesystemsmetadata
Jeff
Jeff

Reputation: 35

Do any modern filesystems support arbitrary metadata handling?

My overall goal is to help people in my organisation find more relevant unstructured data. Files are currently stored on NT drives, multiple SharePoint vintages, Linux disks. Various open and proprietary file formats, some support metadata, many don't.

I need tools that can interrogate files for metadata - some work needed here. I also need something that can crawl and index the metadata, and put it in context - again, further work needed.

However, having generated some metadata for a file, I'd like to attach it to the file inside the filesystem, so that it always remains with the file - not a hidden file or anything like that, but a deeper association within the file system. Do any file systems (preferably Linux) support this kind of feature?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 175

Answers (1)

nos
nos

Reputation: 229058

Yes, that's called extended attributes, and most native filesystems on linux supports it.

You can manipulate these attributes with the getfattr/setfattr commands, and there's a corresponding C API for doing the same.

Upvotes: 1

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