Rick Moen - 29.05.19, 04:14:
> Quoting Bruce Ferrell (bferrell@???):
> > I am absolutely astounded by the number of time I've seen *IX
> > "admins" at fortune X companies copy a tree to a windows share and
> > wonder why it's broken when they try to restore from it. NFS, if not
> > done correctly, can do that same thing too. So...
>
> Reminds me of something I forgot to mention earlier. Most Linux folks
> have heard of the stat(2) system call, but did you know there's also
> an informative stat(1) system _utility_? Play with it on diverse
> sorts of file/directory targets, and see how informative it is. It
> shows in human-readable form _all_ metadata available about any
> filesystem object.

At the moment not in all cases all the metadata. Recent kernels have an
extended statx() syscall that AFAIK is not yet fully supported in user
space tools. It will support things like a creation time or the maximum
filename length or file size of a filesystem while unlike stat() also being
extendable. Once fully supported desktop environments or cp/rsync and so
on could bail out on copying a file larger than 4 GiB to a FAT32
partition instead of copying 4 GiB and then stopping due to an error.

--
Martin