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ACL_GET_FILE(3) Library Functions Manual ACL_GET_FILE(3) acl_get_file — get an ACL by filename
Linux Access Control Lists library (libacl, -lacl).
<sys/types.h> <sys/acl.h> acl_t acl_get_file(const char *path_p, acl_type_t type)
The acl_get_file() function retrieves the access ACL associated with a file or directory, or the default ACL associated with a directory. The pathname for the file or directory is pointed to by the argument path_p. The ACL is placed into working storage and acl_get_file() returns a pointer to that storage. In order to read an ACL from an object, a process must have read access to the object's attributes. The value of the argument type is used to indicate whether the access ACL or the default ACL associated with path_p is returned. If type is ACL_TYPE_ACCESS, the access ACL of path_p is returned. If type is ACL_TYPE_DEFAULT, the default ACL of path_p is returned. If type is ACL_TYPE_DEFAULT and no default ACL is associated with the directory path_p, then an ACL containing zero ACL entries is returned. If type specifies a type of ACL that cannot be associated with path_p, then the function fails. This function may cause memory to be allocated. The caller should free any releasable memory, when the new ACL is no longer required, by calling acl_free(3) with the (void*)acl_t returned by acl_get_file() as an argument.
On success, this function returns a pointer to the working storage. On error, a value of (acl_t)NULL is returned, and errno is set appropriately.
If any of the following conditions occur, the acl_get_file() function returns a value of (acl_t)NULL and sets errno to the corresponding value: [EACCES] Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix or the object exists and the process does not have appropriate access rights. Argument type specifies a type of ACL that cannot be associated with path_p. [EINVAL] The argument type is not ACL_TYPE_ACCESS or ACL_TYPE_DEFAULT. [ENAMETOOLONG] The length of the argument path_p is too long. [ENOENT] The named object does not exist or the argument path_p points to an empty string. [ENOMEM] The ACL working storage requires more memory than is allowed by the hardware or system- imposed memory management constraints. [ENOTDIR] A component of the path prefix is not a directory. [ENOTSUP] The file system on which the file identified by path_p is located does not support ACLs, or ACLs are disabled.
IEEE Std 1003.1e draft 17 (“POSIX.1e”, abandoned)
acl_free(3), acl_get_entry(3), acl_get_fd(3), acl_set_file(3), acl(5)
Derived from the FreeBSD manual pages written by Robert N M Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>, and adapted for Linux by Andreas Gruenbacher <andreas.gruenbacher@gmail.com>.
This page is part of the acl (manipulating access control lists) project. Information about the project can be found at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/acl. If you have a bug report for this manual page, see ⟨http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=acl⟩. This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/acl.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repository was 2025-05-12.) If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org Linux ACL March 23, 2002 ACL_GET_FILE(3) | HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. | |