From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: chattr: operation not supported ( on symlinks ) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 10:29:57 -0500 Message-ID: <20140308152957.GA11633@thunk.org> References: <531A2918.9020108@ubuntu.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: ext4 development To: Phillip Susi Return-path: Received: from imap.thunk.org ([74.207.234.97]:38755 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751820AbaCHPaA (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Mar 2014 10:30:00 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <531A2918.9020108@ubuntu.com> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 03:16:24PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote: > It seems that symlinks return -ENOTSUP for lsattr, causing chattr -R > to spew errors. Why don't symlinks support attributes, and if not, > shouldn't chattr know this and suppress operating on symlinks instead > of spewing errors? The VFS layer doesn't pass ioctl's down to the file system layer for symlinks. Thinking about this, arguably the right answer is to allow chattr to function on symlinks, since it cloud be useful to make symlinks immutable. - Ted