On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 09:26:13 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@transmeta.com> said:
> I've long wanted to have "flags" system calls, because I hate ioctl's with
> a passion. However, nobody was bothered enough by it to actually implement
> it..
Yes, somebody did. I distributed that as part of my old raw IO
patches, and will fold it into 2.3 if you like.
> {l,f,}chflags({name,fd,name}, u32 *old, u32 *new);
> and then you can read and write the flags with just one system call. I do
> not want to extend on stat() yet again.
Exactly: it defined
+asmlinkage int sys_fsattr(const char * filename, unsigned int len,
+ const char *in, char *out)
which also allows the vector of flag bits to grow beyond 4 bytes in the
future. It mapped all of the ext3 attributes correctly to the portable
ATTR_FLAG_* definitions and allowed attributes to be set on device files
(which was the whole reason for it at the time). The only thing missing
was the lfsattr variant.
--Stephen
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