Re: Attempt at "stat light" implementation

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>]

On Apr 07, 2009  18:56 +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > >Once you have fine-grained selection of stat fields - it's natural to
> > >ask why not allow _additional_ stat fields in an future-extensible
> > >fashion?  A few things would be handy sometimes, such as inode
> > >generation number, modification generation number (to detect changes
> > >across reboots), and extra flags indicating COW or other properties.
> > 
> > That's quite an interesting thought...  until you run out of flags, the 
> > stat structure becomes a bit more flexible.
> 
> I suspect at least one other unix or unix-like OS has done this
> already, and it might be worth copying the interface.  But none come to
> mind.

There is one in OS/X called getattrlist, but it is quite complex and
would require attribute handling wildly different than what the kernel
and *nix applications are doing:

http://www.manpagez.com/man/2/getattrlist/

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.