Preserve extended attributes while copy

[Kroz]

Extended attributes are nice to store comments and keywords to files.

Set an extended attribute to a file:
$ attr -s variable -V "value" filename.txt

Now see it:
$ attr -l filename.txt

If you copy such file with mc, extended attribute will be absent for file's copy.
It would be nice to have an option like "preserve Extended attributes" to let mc copy extended attributes as well.

[andrew_b]

Ticket #3910 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[fedy]

Any chance of this getting implemented (especially for file move)?

I've been using Midnight Commander for about 20 years now and I still really like it, but recently I started to make a heavy use of user extended attributes and unfortunately mc is one of the few file managers that still don't support it.

It's somewhat OK on copy operations when you notice in time (you can transfer the xattrs manually from the original), but it can be really infuriating on a file move where everything is fine with moves within a mounted volume, but once you move a file to a different drive/partition you irrevocably loose all the metadata you put into the xattrs.

NOTE:
The attr command mentioned above seem to be XFS specific. The generic (filesystem agnostic) commands these days are getfattr, setfattr etc.

[zaytsev]

Can you mention any managers supporting it by default? Maybe we can steal code from them.