FileNote update After a lot of googling and reading, I finally managed to set some "file notes". I found the following pages especially useful:
http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/06/13/1352241&tid=113&tid=70&tid=89 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes http://www.squarebox.co.uk/cgi-squarebox/manServer/usr/share/man/man5/attr.5 Before attr, getfattr or setfattr would work, I had to add the user_xattr flag to the drive's entry in /etc/fstab and umount/mount the partition. Then I could define my own "file note" like this: attr -s user.comment -V "Just testing..." my.txt Attribute "user.comment" set to a 15 byte value for my.txt: Just testing... attr -g user.comment my.txt Attribute "user.comment" had a 15 byte value for my.txt: Just testing... Whereas the "user." part is mandatory and the "comment" part is up to the user to define. Strangely enough, getfattr/setfattr and attr seem to be incompatible. Here's what I got when I tried to read the previously with attr set user.commentusing getfattr: getfattr -n user.comment my.txt my.txt: user.comment: No such attribute So I guess I have to stick to either one of them. Thanks to all who replied to my question and especially Ron Johnson, who set me on track of the Extrended Attributes. Without your support I would never have solved this problem. Greetings, Manon.