Francois Thunus wrote in a message to All:

 FT> my extended attribute file on a fat drive is growing. I am
 FT> pretty sure that it contains out of date information. does
 FT> anybody know of any utility that can clean it up, like
 FT> wpsclean to deregister unused objects or initmaint to have a
 FT> look at the INI file and clean it manually ???
 FT> Alternatively, does anybody know either the structure or the
 FT> place I can get the structure of the said file in order to
 FT> write the utility myself ?

The "EA DATA. SF" pseudo-file is not a file.  It is chained up
into a file to account for the space and keep the FAT file system happy if
you boot real DOS, but it is never accessed by OS/2 as a file.  Rather, the
pseudo-file is actually a sort of deliberately fragmented set of small disk
structures, each of which is associated with a conventional file as owner. 
When OS/2 accesses the EAs for a conventional file, it uses some extra
information in the FAT-format directory entry to find the chunk of disk
space that contains the EAs, and this coincides with some position in the
pseudo-file.

Profile information associated with the system and the Desktop is not
usually contained in the EAs of individual files, but rather in the OS2.INI
and OS2SYS.INI files.  These are purely WPS-managed conventional files, and
they are accessed as such.  There are a number of commonly available tools
which can clean the INI files, but this has little to do with EAs.
 
-- Mike


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