I was hoping to find a list of filesystems under linux which a) have extended attributes and b) are supported by xattr. I could not find such info on the xattr home page. Could this information be added?

Here it is.
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#!/usr/bin/python
import os,sys
import os.path
from md5 import md5
from xattr import xattr
from optparse import OptionParser

# you may want to set these variables
BLOCK_SIZE = 1024
attribute_name = 'user.md5sum'
MD5SUMS_FILENAME = 'md5sums.txt'

# there is no use for the option parser now
parser = OptionParser()

opts, args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])

def md5sum(afile):
    “”"returns the standard md5sum hexdigest
    for a file object”"”
    m = md5()
    block = afile.read(BLOCK_SIZE)
    while block:
        m.update(block)
        block = afile.read(BLOCK_SIZE)
    return m.hexdigest()

def append_md5sum(mainfile, filename, md5digest):
    mainfile.write(’%s  %s\n’ % (md5digest, filename))

if len(args) == 0:
    top = ‘.’
else:
    print “can’t handle arguments right now”
    sys.exit(1)

main_md5sums_filename = os.path.join(top, MD5SUMS_FILENAME)
main_md5sums = file(main_md5sums_filename, ‘w’)

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(top, topdown=False):
    for name in files:
        filename = os.path.join(root, name)
        if filename != main_md5sums_filename:
            xf = xattr(filename)
            if xf.has_key(attribute_name):
                md = xf.get(attribute_name)
            else:
                md = md5sum(file(filename))
                xf.set(attribute_name, md)
            append_md5sum(main_md5sums, filename, md)
main_md5sums.close()

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btw, thanks for making my life a little easier now. :)

I am not all that found of resource forks, so I am happy to see xattr. And real happy to see this module.

On OSX, I did notice the enforcement of the 4K value limits with:

IOError: [Errno 7] Argument list too long

But when I make the key longer than 128 bytes the error is not as descriptive:

IOError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted

I wish this was more descriptive, but probably Apples fault?

Regards