On Jun 25, 2006, at 4:28 PM, Dan Shoop wrote:
[Boyd Waters asked]
Is there really no way to copy a file - along with *all* metadata* -
in one operation?
Not currently it seems. :(
And probably it's going to be a very long wait, so long as Apple
keeps cruft in .DS_Store's as said cruft would need to be copied
between source and target .DS_Store's which is a
Moreover Spotlight non-comment metadata isn't likely to get copied
ever, but probably shouldn't be either; nor is there much value as
the kernel can just re-create it.
Hmm.. ok, I think I understand about the Spotlight meta-data being
re-created: that's determined by the various Spotlight metadata
importers, which pull info from the "data-data" of the file and
populate various name/value pairs for the Spotlight search tool. I've
written such a metadata-importer spec for Spotlight...
But I'm more interested in storing other meta-data values in files as
POSIX extended attributes, and I want any file operations to preserve
those xattrs.
This seems to work already:
$ xattr --set fred blue foo
$ xattr --set barney red foo
$ xattr --list foo
foo
barney red
fred blue
$ cp foo bar
$ xattr --list bar
bar
barney red
fred blue
So perhaps - for my use cases, anyway - the only thing I need to worry
about is file transfer to non-Macintosh servers via ssh or rsync (that
is, non-Mac-mounted filesystems). I've patched rsync on my Linux box
to handle that, but scp needs a similar patch? (I see that Mac scp has
the '-E' flag).
$ scp foo host.loopback.edu:test-axttr
foo 100% 0
0.0KB/s 00:00
$ scp host.loopback.edu:test-axttr ./roundTrip
test-axttr 100% 0
0.0KB/s 00:00
$ xattr --list ./roundTrip
./roundTrip
(no extended attributes)
Dan, thanks for these answers!
