NAME

OS2::ExtAttr - Perl access to extended attributes.

SYNOPSIS

use OS2::ExtAttr;
tie %ea, 'OS2::ExtAttr', 'my.file';
print $ea{eaname};
$ea{myfield} = 'value';

untie %ea;

DESCRIPTION

The package provides low-level and high-level interface to Extended Attributes under OS/2.

High-level interface: tie

The only argument of tie() is a file name, or an open file handle.

Note that all the changes of the tied hash happen in core, to propagate it to disk the tied hash should be untie()ed or should go out of scope. Alternatively, one may use the low-level update method on the corresponding object. Example:

tied(%hash)->update;

Note also that setting/getting EA flag is not supported by the high-level interface, one should use the low-level interface instead. To use it on a tied hash one needs undocumented way to find eas give the tied hash.

Low-level interface

Two low-level methods are supported by the objects: copy() and update(). The copy() takes one argument: the name of a file to copy the attributes to, or an opened file handle. update() takes no arguments, and is discussed above.

Three convenience functions are provided:

value($eas, $key)
add($eas, $key, $value [, $flag])
replace($eas, $key, $value [, $flag])

The default value for flag is 0.

In addition, all the _ea_* and _ead_* functions defined in EMX library are supported, with leading _ea and _ead stripped.

AUTHOR

Ilya Zakharevich, ilya@math.ohio-state.edu

SEE ALSO

perl(1).