Bug 51871

Summary:	getxattr() man page wrongly refers to ENOATTR
Product:	Documentation	Reporter:	Andrew Perepechko (andrew_perepechko)
Component:	man-pages	Assignee:	documentation_man-pages (documentation_man-pages)
Status:	RESOLVED CODE_FIX
Severity:	normal	CC:	mtk.manpages
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:		Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:

Description Andrew Perepechko 2012-12-20 18:05:19 UTC

man 2 getxattr reads:

"If the named attribute does not exist, or the process has no access to this attribute, errno is set to ENOATTR."

However, the actual error code returned is ENODATA.

Comment 1 Andrew Perepechko 2012-12-20 18:13:53 UTC

Hm, actually ENODATA is an alias of ENOATTR defined in libattr header.

Comment 2 Anonymous Emailer 2012-12-22 08:19:28 UTC

Reply-To: hch@infradead.org

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 06:13:54PM +0000, bugzilla-daemon@bugzilla.kernel.org wrote:
> --- Comment #1 from Andrew Perepechko <andrew_perepechko@xyratex.com> 
> 2012-12-20 18:13:53 ---
> Hm, actually ENODATA is an alias of ENOATTR defined in libattr header.

But that's:

 a) not how normal Posix errno values are supposed to work.  I
 b) limited to using xattr, whichle getxattr is also exposed by glibc
 directly.

This really needs an explanation in the NOTES section, I'll see if I can
come up with someting useful.

Comment 3 Michael Kerrisk 2013-01-18 23:00:47 UTC

Andrew, (and Christoph),

Others have also noted this point. For each of the relevant pages, I've simply added the text: "(ENOATTR is defined to be a synonym for ENODATA in <attr/xattr.h>.)"

Comment 4 Andrew Perepechko 2013-01-18 23:04:33 UTC

Thanks, Michael and Christoph!