acl_to_text(3)

acl_to_text3

Convert an acl to text

Usage

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <sys/acl.h>

char *

acl_to_text(acl_t acl, ssize_t *len_p);

Library

Linux Access Control Lists library (libacl, -lacl).

Overview

The acl_to_text() function translates the ACL pointed to by the argument acl into a NULL terminated character string. If the pointer len_p is not NULL, then the function returns the length of the string (not including the NULL terminator) in the location pointed to by len_p. The format of the text string returned by acl_to_text() is the long text form defined in acl(5). The ACL referred to by acl is not changed.

This function allocates any memory necessary to contain the string and returns a pointer to the string. The caller should free any releasable memory, when the new string is no longer required, by calling acl_free(3) with the (void*)char returned by acl_to_text() as an argument.

Return value

On success, this function returns a pointer to the long text form of the ACL. On error, a value of (char *)NULL is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

Errors

If any of the following conditions occur, the acl_to_text() function returns a value of (char *)NULL and sets errno to the corresponding value:

[EINVAL]

The argument acl is not a valid pointer to an ACL.

The ACL referenced by acl contains one or more improperly formed ACL entries, or for some other reason cannot be translated into a text form of an ACL.

[ENOMEM]

The character string to be returned requires more memory than is allowed by the hardware or system-imposed memory management constraints.

Releases

13 releases since Debian 3.0 (Woody); the text changed 5 times.

  1. 3.0
  2. 3.1
  3. 4.0–5.0
  4. 6.0–9
  5. 10
  6. 11–Arch

Standards

IEEE Std 1003.1e draft 17 (“POSIX.1e”, abandoned)

Author

Derived from the FreeBSD manual pages written by Robert N M Watson ⟨[email protected]⟩, and adapted for Linux by Andreas Gruenbacher ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From acl 2.4.0-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.