Hi all,

This is yet another problem that has been bugging me for quite some time.What I intend to do is to find out if at all there is any way by which we can find out the metadata information in the unix filesystem ?

I am trying to simplify the problem. In unix fileystsem say I have an ordinary file called file1 .Now I can always view the contents of this file by doing a cat , head , view etc but all that mean that I can view the contents of the file. What if I really want to find out the metadata information pertaining to this file ? Noteworthy to mention , here I am really not trying to find out the inode number of the file , since that can be easily done by
ls - i -l.I am trying to find the loction where if I look I can get the approximate size that is utilised to store the metadata information for this file ?

It will be so nice if anyone can throw light in this matter.

Thanks Prasun.

Just about all of the metadata about a file can be read with the 'stat' command.

Some files also have extended attributes, for those you need to use attr, getfattr and setfattr.

Some files can have ACLs in addition to normal unix rights, for those you need getfacl and setfacl.

Thanks a lot .


But still I would like to know one thing !

How shall I use this command ...is it like this stat <filename> ? I had tried out with every other option that you have suggested like stat , attr , etc but none of them seem to work in my machine.

Plaese tell me how shall I use the command to know the metadata information for a particular file.

Thanks Prasun

/usr/bin/stat is part of coreutils on my machine, I can't imagine that you wouldn't have it too.

/usr/bin/attr is part of the attr package.

/usr/bin/getfacl is part of the acl package.

Both of those are optional since they're not in very widespread use so far, but I would imagine that most distributions have them packaged somewhere.

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reply.I went to my /usr/bin and /bin directory to find dbiostat , lpstat ,

netstat , nfsstat but not stat. But anyways I will try to 'man' them and find out what needs to

be done.Meanwhile it will be great if you can tell me as to how shall I find out the space

allocated for the metadata information of a file.


Thanks and Regards
Prasun.

That would be very filesystem specific.

Yes, I want to find out exactly that . I mean how much ( in terms of space unit slike KB , MB etc)

metadata information is stored for a particular file.


Thanks Prasun.

I know what you mean, but it would be very filesystem specific and would require special tools like xfs_db or xfs_admin for XFS filesystems.

Why do you need to know this?