Handle extended file attributes

Problem

You want to handle extended file attributes from Python.

Solution

If you are not familiar with extended file attributes, you can read more about it here. I also have a blog post (see here), in which I show how to set/remove extended file attributes using the attr Linux command.

To handle the extended file attributes from Python, you can use the pyxattr package: https://github.com/iustin/pyxattr

Its usage is very simple:

>>> import xattr
>>> xattr.listxattr("main.py")
[b'user.com.dropbox.attrs']
>>> xattr.getxattr("main.py", "user.com.dropbox.attrs")
b'\n\x12...'
>>> xattr.setxattr("main.py", "user.com.dropbox.ignored", "1")
>>> xattr.listxattr("main.py")
[b'user.com.dropbox.attrs', b'user.com.dropbox.ignored']
>>> xattr.getxattr("main.py", "user.com.dropbox.ignored")
b'1'
>>> xattr.removexattr("main.py", "user.com.dropbox.ignored")
>>> xattr.listxattr("main.py")
[b'user.com.dropbox.attrs']

A typical use case: you want Dropbox to ignore your venv/ folder inside your project.

Links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes
• https://help.dropbox.com/sync/ignored-files
• https://github.com/iustin/pyxattr (I used this in this post)
• https://github.com/xattr/xattr (an alternative)