This was a really quick and dirty wrapper to get xattr support for one of my projects. Due to limited time, it's not in gem form, sorry. But maybe it's useful for someone anyway.
Just the ffi gem.
Every File object gains a few methods. xattr acts as an array-like. You can query attributes via [] and set them via []=. Setting an attribute nil will remove it. A list of all keys is available via listxattr and a hash of all xattrs, key and value, is available via dumpxattr.
f = File.new("testfile.txt")
f.xattr["user.note"] = "Just a text file"
f.xattr["user.note"]
=> "just a text file"
f.listxattr
=> ["user.note"]
f.dumpxattr
=> { "user.note" => "Just a text file"
It's far from being good code, but it works. I used it only for strings, so everything gets converted to UTF_8 before and after writing/reading.
It's only a thin wrapper. Depending on the system you normally have only access to a specific namespace. For linux, that's the "user.*" namespace. Forgetting the "user." part will raise an error.
BSD 2-Clause.
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