It's a feature not a bug: $ man 5 attr ... The file permission bits of regular files and directories are interpreted differently from the file permission bits of special files and symbolic links. For regular files and directories the file permission bits define access to the file's contents, while for device special files they define access to the device described by the special file. The file permissions of symbolic links are not used in access checks. These differences would allow users to consume filesystem resources in a way not controllable by disk quotas for group or world writable special files and directories.
For this reason, extended user attributes are only allowed for regular files and directories, and access to extended user attributes is restricted to the owner and to users with appropriate capabilities for directories with the sticky bit set (see the chmod(1) manual page for an explanation of Sticky Directories). ... -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/919896 Title: can't set xattr on a symlink (operation not permitted) [ext4] To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/919896/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
