At present, in Linux there are four different namespaces for extended file attributes:

• user
• trusted
• security
• system

Many tools are available for manipulating extended attributes, and these are normally included in the attr package, which comes with most Linux distributions.

If attr is not installed in your system, simply execute the following command to install it:

sudo apt-get install attr

To check if this package is installed on our system, just run attr in the Terminal. If an output appears as shown here, it will confirm that the package is installed:

The next step is to check if the kernel has support for the attribute. It can be checked using the following command:

The output confirms that the kernel has attribute support.

We also need to confirm that the filesystem is mounted with the user_xattr option. To confirm this, we run this command: