Avid Seeker

Binding files to belong to other files

There was an old feature in Windows that somehow bind files to each other. Try this on Windows: Ctrl+S to save this page as HTML, then rename the HTML file, you’ll get a dialog like:

If you rename this file, it will no longer blong to the folder ‘Linux - Wikipedia_files’

Dialog showing the prompt

And when the html file is moved to another location, its asset directory is also moved.

The use cases for this are plenty. The most common one is when you have a lot of markdown files with corresponding asset directories (think of static websites generators).

When I switched to Linux, I just accepted this might require a lot of work to get implemented. But I was just looking into Extended attributes and thought it might be way easier. Of course, every file manager (and perhaps CLI utilities) might need to be reworked to respect the attached xattr, but it still simplifies the job.

See also