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JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, ext3/4, and btrfs all support extended attributes – that's become a bigger deal for things like ACLs – but along with varying size limits the share the same limitations as NTFS, HFS+, etc. of not indexing those values.

That means there's no way to do a query like "file type = audio/mp3" without either walking the filesystem or querying a separate index, which removes a lot of the benefits.




I think NTFS can index alternate data streams¹, but yeah, I agree no filesystems are on the level that BeFS was of easy querying and versatility.

¹ I am not sure about this, but https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... seems to suggest it


I'm not sure either – it definitely did not in the past but I haven't needed to look into it for years. Things like WinFS were going to solve that the right way but since that never shipped I assume they were still relying on a bolt-on indexing service.




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