Why doesn't `getfattr -d` show anything?

Question

The successful command from which I started:

getfattr -n system.ntfs_times /media/hdd/oldfolder/

output

getfattr: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: media/hdd/oldfolder/
system.ntfs_times=irrelevant

but if i try

getfattr -d /media/hdd/oldfolder/ or getfattr -d -e text /media/hdd/oldfolder/ or hex or base64 as values of param -e i get nothing.

Why is that? I thought -d dump ALL attributes not NO attributes :)

Solution 1

To truly report all attributes you can use the argument -dm-, which represents the arguments -d and -m -.

For example I launched Chromium, I went to https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=86198, that action started to download a file and I named it "my_downloaded_file".

Then I executed getfattr -m- my_downloaded_file and it showed:

# file: my_downloaded_file
user.xdg.origin.url

although more information was shown executing getfattr -dm- my_downloaded_file:

# file: my_downloaded_file
user.xdg.origin.url="https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=86198"

References:

- man getfattr
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/46587
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/50781
- https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/linux_commands.html
- https://kign.blogspot.com.es/2008/08/mystery-of-plus.html

Solution 2

The man page of getfattr command is not clear on this, but to really see all output, use the following switch:

getfattr -m - $your_path_or_file_name

From man page:

-m pattern, --match=pattern
           Only include attributes with names matching the regular expression pattern.  The default value for pattern
           is "^user\\.", which includes all the attributes in the user namespace.  Specify  "-"  for  including  all
           attributes.  Refer to attr(5) for a more detailed discussion of namespaces.

Comments

[elig]

I too tried and did not manage to get various options to work for me until I found and tried this:getfattr -d -m ".*" <filename> . Source: superuser.com/questions/858210/…

[Tom Hale]

Related: ntfs-3g: setfattr succeeds but getfattr shows no change