Thanks Matt!  That should help explain what few things might show up but this seems like a fairly rare occurrence and unlikely to be of use to most people or students at least until a system administration class. 

Just for grins though, I'd still like to find something that shows the positional usage for the output from lsattr.  Perhaps there is a clue in that man chattr shows 18 attributes and lsattr shows 19 (by my count) positions in the attr list.

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 10:02 AM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:
From: Dazed_75 <lthielster@gmail.com>
> Joseph mentioned the command lsattr which I had forgotten about so I read
> the man page and tried it.  I can find no explanation of the meaning of the
> results.
>
> --------------I--e- /var/log/bootchart
>
> While http://linux.die.net/man/5/attr gives a fair explanation of what
> extended attributes are used for, I've found nothing to help interpret the
> attributes displayed by lsattr.

"man chattr" says:

The ’I’ attribute is used by the htree code to  indicate  that  a
directory  is
being  indexed  using hashed trees.  It may not be set or reset using
chattr(1),
although it can be displayed by lsattr(1).

...which is a bit strange, but whatever.  Not that many of the attrs described
in the man page for chattr actually look useful, though the "i" attribute
might be interesting for some things that are rarely modified and really
important (like libc, or inittab, or grub.conf).

--
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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--
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
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