pxattr

Portable utility to work with file extended attributes

Extended attributes are arbitrarily named pieces of data associated with a file and managed by the file system. The names and the values for the attributes are freely chosen by applications and/or users, with very few restrictions. Many recent systems and filesystems support extended attributes, but the interfaces used to manage them are far from identical. Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X all provide similar extended attributes functionality. The pxattr package aims at providing a single interface to extended attributes on all three systems. It consists in a single C++ module (one source and one include file), which is to be included in the application source code, or can be built as a reference command-line utility to manage user extended attributes in a uniform and cross- platform way. It includes an attributes archive/restore facility.