extended attributes

Russell Strong russell at strong.id.au
Tue May 9 09:09:41 UTC 2006


Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 06:25, Aaron Konstam wrote:
>   
>>> I've found that when I edit a file with vi or gedit I lose all of the 
>>> user extended attributes associated with that file.  A stat reveals that 
>>> the inode number has changed.  Is this the reason why I'm losing the 
>>> extended attributes?  Is vi and gedit creating a new file?  Is it easy 
>>> to change this behaviour?
>>>
>>>       
>> I don't know for sure but that makes sense to me. When vi is used, at
>> least, a temporary copy of the file is created to be edited. It would
>> not surprise me that when you save the file a new file with a new inode
>> is created.
>>     
>
> If it did that, you would not be able to edit files where you
> have write permission on the file but not the directory
> containing them and hardlinked files would no longer be
> linked.  It should be copying the temp file contents back
> over the original at least in cases where it can't duplicate
> all the attributes and links.
>
>   
I tried editing a file where I didn't have write permission on the 
directory, only have write permission on the file.  That worked as I 
expected, the EAs were preserved and the inode did not change.  Anyone 
know why vim behaves differently when it has write permissions for the 
directory?  Is this a vim "bug" ( not behaving the way ?most? users 
expect ) or is there a reason?




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