On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 03:23, Russell Coker wrote:
  

What are the plans regarding "ls --context /selinux"?

Currently the lgetxattr() system call returns -1 (EOPNOTSUPP) and the current 
ls patch (taken from Dan's repository) refuses to even allow "ls -l" because 
of it (probably a bug in ls as I imagine that there will always be file 
systems that don't support it).

Will "ls --context /selinux" ever work?
    

Since SELinux migrated to using xattr, the utilities can only get and
set the contexts of files in a filesystem if it provides an xattr
handler.  There doesn't seem to be any reason to support getting or
setting contexts on selinuxfs entries, so I wouldn't expect us to
implement an xattr handler for it.  The 'ls' in the patched coreutils
from the NSA SELinux site simply displays (null) in the context field
for such filesystems; I'm not sure why Dan has changed the behavior in
his latest patch.  There will always be at least some filesystem types
that will not provide xattr handlers, so it does need to cleanly handle
this case.