Re: RFC: changing the "+" in ls -l output to be "." or "+"

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:

> Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>>> Jim Meyering wrote:
>>>>> You might want to do something similar to what I did in fts.c
>>>>> with this change:
>>>>>
>>>>>     http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=97d5b66578be507
>>>> Oh cool, thanks for that.
>>> Hmm, looks like my Fedora 8 system at least with SELinux disabled,
>>> will print security context for some files only.
>>> I.E. I'm not sure it's possible to cache for performance.
>>
>> Please clarify.  What commands are you using?
>> Two files on the same partition?
>> One has SELinux context and the other doesn't?
>
> yep
>
> $ head -n1 /etc/issue
> Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
> $ selinuxenabled || echo disabled
> disabled
> $ ./ls -1Zd ~/public_html ~/ttt
> user_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t:s0 ~/public_html

Glad you noticed that.
I chatted with Eric Paris on IRC and he explained
(as I should have known) that you could very well have a
device with some files having SELinux context and others
having none.  That would not be very likely in practice,
(esp. for fixed drives) but for removable, it's more plausible.

So caching that attribute would not work after all.
Oh well.