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Can I use find to find all files which have extended attributes set? Let's say, I want to find all files with +i, immutable attribute in /foo and its subfolders.

I could not find any, mention of extended attributes in man find.

Is there any other way to find all files with attributes

I am using Debian Wheezy

Martin Vegter
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    @DopeGhoti, I was about to provide the link to Gille's answer. It uses `find` method. The link to Gille's answer is [this one](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/134027/47538). – Ramesh Oct 15 '14 at 20:56
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    BSD `find` (the same that comes with Mac OS) has both `-xattr` and `-xattrname` options to deal with extended attributes. To find files that have extended attributes set you can just use something like `find . -xattr -exec xattr -v {} \;`. Use `-xattrname` to search for specific attributes. – Claudio Floreani Oct 07 '16 at 09:49
  • To delete an attribute by name for example: `find ~/some-path/ -xattrname com.apple.FinderInfo -exec xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo {} \;` – Benno Jan 08 '18 at 07:45
  • @ClaudioFloreani Do you have a source for that? I can't find `-xattr` in any manpage from MacOS, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. – Artefact2 Aug 29 '18 at 13:11
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    there is now a fresh utility that wraps find and supports this for any POSIX compliant OS, you can find it at https://github.com/Cbhihe/findxattr – Gregor Oct 03 '22 at 20:19
  • Immutability is a file attribute (Linux) or file flag (BSDs), not necessarily an extended attribute. Some systems store file attributes as extended attributes but extended attributes are generic key/value stores. My rawhide (rh) program can search for both. To find immutable files do `rh / immutable`. To find files with a particular extended attribute (name or value) do `rh / '"*pattern*".ea'`. It's at https://github.com/raforg/rawhide. – raf Aug 29 '23 at 03:25

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find itself doesn't support extended atttribute but you can use such as:

find ~/ -type f  -iname "*" -exec lsattr {} + | grep  -v -- '-------------'
Marcus
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PersianGulf
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  • This would be very slow as it runs `lsattr` for **every single file**, and there is no need to match `*` - **use this instead**: `find /foo -type f -print0 | xargs -0 lsattr | grep -v -- '-------------'` – Thomas Guyot-Sionnest Oct 09 '21 at 19:28
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    Actually looking at the other answer (this one is a duplicate) `lsattr` supports the `-R` switch (recursive). – Thomas Guyot-Sionnest Oct 09 '21 at 19:30