Re: [Bug-tar] Extended attribute handling

[Andreas Dilger]

On Jun 21, 2017, at 5:23 AM, Angus McInnes <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi, I've noticed a couple of issues in the "tar" documentation that confused 
> me:
> 
> Currently, --xattrs-exclude and --xattrs-include are documented in
> man/info as being POSIX regular expressions, but the actual
> implementation uses fnmatch wildcard patterns, which are quite
> different. The example --xattrs-exclude='^user.' in the documentation
> doesn't work.
> 
> Also, the documentation states that by default all extended attribute
> names are extracted from the archive, but actually if --xattrs-include
> is not provided tar will only extract extended attributes that start
> with "user.".

Yes, this came as quite a surprise to us as well.  The original RHEL xattr
patches always extracted the "lustre.*" xattrs if they exist in the archive,
but this was lost in the port to GNU tar for some reason.

What would be useful is adding some kind of configuration option that
allows setting which xattrs will be extracted.  For example, either checking
an environment variable, or /etc/tar.conf or ~/.tar for xattrs (and possibly
other options).

Cheers, Andreas

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