A directory with the T attribute will be deemed to be the top of directory hierarchies for the purposes of the Orlov block allocator.
This is a hint to the block allocator used by ext3 and ext4 that the subdirectories under this directory are not related, and thus should be spread apart for allocation purposes.
For example: it is a very good idea to set the T attribute on the /home directory, so that /home/john and /home/mary are placed into separate block groups.
For directories where this attribute is not set, the Orlov block allocator will try to group subdirectories closer together where possible.
No tail-merging
t
+t to set -t to clear
For those filesystems that support tail-merging, a file with the t attribute will not have a partial block fragment at the end of the file merged with other files.
This is necessary for applications such as LILO, which reads the filesystem directly and doesn't understand tail-merged files.
Synchronous updates
S
+S to set -S to clear
When a file with the S attribute set is modified, the changes are written synchronously on the disk; this is equivalent to the 'sync' mount option applied to a subset of the files.
This is equivalent to the syncmount option, applied to a subset of the files.
A file with the j attribute has all of its data written to the ext3 journal before being written to the file itself, if the filesystem is mounted with the "data=ordered" or "data=writeback" options.
When the filesystem is mounted with the "data=journal" option all file data is already journaled, so this attribute has no effect.
Indexed directory
I
(unavailable)
The I attribute is used by the htree program code to indicate that a directory is being indexed using hashed trees.