The return value from os.stat() includes st_flags on some systems, but
currently there's not much that can be done with the value; this patch aims
to make st_flags useful by adding some associated constants to stat.py and
the corresponding chflags() and lchflags() functions in posixmodule. For
completeness, shutil.copystat() is also updated to call os.chflags() where
it's available.

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Patch looks good. Do we want to include it?

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What operating systems is this available on?  The only one
I've found is OS X.  The man page says it's from BSD 4.4.  I
tried on Linux of various flavors (4+), Solaris, and Tru64.
 None of them had chflags.  I also could only find some of
the flags in my sys/stat.h that were added to stat.py. 
stat.h didn't have UF_NOUNLINK, SF_NOUNLINK, SF_SNAPSHOT.

As far as the patch itself, it looks good.  There are a
couple of changes if this should be accepted though:  doc
needs \versionadded{2.5}, I would prefer flags as the var
name rather than i in posixmodule.c (btw you shouldn't need
to init path).

Also would need to update Misc/NEWS and ACKS if accepted.

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In addition to MacOS, chflags(2) is available on FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, and
NetBSD. The flags in Lib/stat.py are the full set of
available values
although, as you noted, MacOS hasn't (yet) implemented
several of them.

Thanks for the comments - I've attached an updated version
of the patch
incorporating your suggestions.

Thanks for the patch. Committed as r53826.

It looks like Tru64 does have some version of chflags, however, it is undocumented and apparently causes  python to exit.  It is at least one of the reasons for the recent buildbot failures:

http://python.org/dev/buildbot/all/alpha%20Tru64%205.1%20trunk/builds/1550/step-test/0

That doesn't really tell the whole story, but I logged on to the machine and ran the test, after modifying unittest to flush the stream, sigh :-( and got this:

ringneck:/net/cci/nnorwitz/python/trunk.norwitz-tru64/nn-work-build % ./python -E -tt ./Lib/test/regrtest.py -v test_posix
test_posix
testNoArgFunctions (test.test_posix.PosixTester) ... ok
test_access (test.test_posix.PosixTester) ... ok
test_chdir (test.test_posix.PosixTester) ... ok
test_chflags (test.test_posix.PosixTester) ... Bad system call

nnorwitz, can you please report whether the attached patch fixes it?
File Added: chflags.diff

Martin's patch from 2007-03-21 fixed the problem with test_posix.  It
now passes all the tests (test_posix and rest of test suite).  The
tests/interpreter do not exit prematurely.

I think it is good to apply this patch.

Committed chflags.diff as r59317.