find files with extended attributes

Question

Can I use find to find all files which have extended attributes set? Let's say, I want to find all files with +i, immutable attribute in /foo and its subfolders.

I could not find any, mention of extended attributes in man find.

Is there any other way to find all files with attributes

I am using Debian Wheezy

@DopeGhoti, I was about to provide the link to Gille's answer. It uses find method. The link to Gille's answer is this one. — Ramesh, Oct 15 '14 at 20:56
BSD find (the same that comes with Mac OS) has both -xattr and -xattrname options to deal with extended attributes. To find files that have extended attributes set you can just use something like find . -xattr -exec xattr -v {} \;. Use -xattrname to search for specific attributes. — Claudio Floreani, Oct 07 '16 at 09:49
To delete an attribute by name for example: find ~/some-path/ -xattrname com.apple.FinderInfo -exec xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo {} \; — Benno, Jan 08 '18 at 07:45
@ClaudioFloreani Do you have a source for that? I can't find -xattr in any manpage from MacOS, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. — Artefact2, Aug 29 '18 at 13:11
there is now a fresh utility that wraps find and supports this for any POSIX compliant OS, you can find it at https://github.com/Cbhihe/findxattr — Gregor, Oct 03 '22 at 20:19
Immutability is a file attribute (Linux) or file flag (BSDs), not necessarily an extended attribute. Some systems store file attributes as extended attributes but extended attributes are generic key/value stores. My rawhide (rh) program can search for both. To find immutable files do rh / immutable. To find files with a particular extended attribute (name or value) do rh / '"*pattern*".ea'. It's at https://github.com/raforg/rawhide. — raf, Aug 29 '23 at 03:25

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 26 '19 at 14:55

4

find itself doesn't support extended atttribute but you can use such as:

find ~/ -type f  -iname "*" -exec lsattr {} + | grep  -v -- '-------------'

edited Jul 26 '19 at 14:55

Marcus

961

answered Oct 15 '14 at 20:58

PersianGulf

10,850

This would be very slow as it runs lsattr for every single file, and there is no need to match * - use this instead: find /foo -type f -print0 | xargs -0 lsattr | grep -v -- '-------------' – Thomas Guyot-Sionnest Oct 09 '21 at 19:28
2

Actually looking at the other answer (this one is a duplicate) lsattr supports the -R switch (recursive). – Thomas Guyot-Sionnest Oct 09 '21 at 19:30

find files with extended attributes

1 Answers1