[2] The getea,[3] setea,[4] listea,[5] statea,[6] and removeea[7] APIs support fetching, setting, listing, getting information about, and removing extended attributes.
Extended file attributes can be viewed and edited in Be-like systems' GUI through the file-manager, often Tracker or derivatives thereof.
In Linux, the ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, Squashfs, UBIFS, Yaffs2, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, Btrfs, OrangeFS, Lustre, OCFS2 1.6, ZFS, and F2FS[11] filesystems support extended attributes (abbreviated xattr) when enabled in the kernel configuration.
[13][14] As of 2016, they are not yet in widespread use by user-space Linux programs, but are used by Beagle, OpenStack Swift, Dropbox, KDE's semantic metadata framework (Baloo), Chromium, Wget, cURL, and Snapcraft.
No namespace restrictions are present (making this an open xattr system) and the convention is to use a reverse DNS string (similar to Uniform Type Identifiers) as the attribute name.
[23] In some older versions of macOS (such as Mac OS X 10.6), user space extended attributes were not preserved on save in common Cocoa applications (TextEdit, Preview etc.).
[citation needed] Support for extended file attributes was removed from the OpenBSD source code in 2005 due to a lack of interest in Access Control Lists.
[24] In OS/2 version 1.2 and later, the High Performance File System was designed with extended attributes in mind, but support for them was also retro-fitted on the FAT filesystem of DOS.
This file is normally inaccessible when an operating system supporting extended attributes manages the disk, but can be freely manipulated under, for example, DOS.
Parts of OS/2 version 2.0 and later such as the Workplace Shell uses several standardized extended attributes (also called EAs) for purposes like identifying the filetype, comments, computer icons and keywords about the file.
Programs written in the interpreted language Rexx store an already parsed version of the code as an extended attribute, to allow faster execution.
[27] Additionally, NTFS can store arbitrary-length extended attributes in the form of alternate data streams (ADS), a type of resource fork.