setfiles(8) — Linux manual page
setfiles(8) SELinux User Command setfiles(8)
NAME
setfiles - set SELinux file security contexts.
SYNOPSIS
setfiles [-c policy] [-C] [-d] [-l] [-m] [-n] [-e directory] [-E]
[-p] [-s] [-v] [-W] [-F] [-I|-D] [-T nthreads] spec_file
pathname ...
DESCRIPTION
This manual page describes the setfiles program.
This program is primarily used to initialize the security context
fields (extended attributes) on one or more filesystems (or parts
of them). Usually it is initially run as part of the SELinux
installation process (a step commonly known as labeling).
It can also be run at any other time to correct inconsistent
labels, to add support for newly-installed policy or, by using
the -n option, to passively check whether the file contexts are
all set as specified by the active policy (default behavior) or
by some other policy (see the -c option).
If a file object does not have a context, setfiles will write the
default context to the file object's extended attributes. If a
file object has a context, setfiles will only modify the type
portion of the security context. The -F option will force a
replacement of the entire context.
OPTIONS
-c check the validity of the contexts against the specified
binary policy.
-C If only relabeling errors are encountered during the file
tree walks, exit with status 1 rather than 255.
-d show what specification matched each file.
-e directory
directory to exclude (repeat option for more than one
directory).
-E treat conflicting specifications as errors, such as where
two hardlinks for the same inode have different contexts.
-f infilename
infilename contains a list of files to be processed. Use
“-” for stdin.
-F Force reset of context to match file_context for
customizable files, and the default file context, changing
the user, role, range portion as well as the type.
-h, -? display usage information and exit.
-i ignore files that do not exist.
-I ignore digest to force checking of labels even if the
stored SHA1 digest matches the specfiles SHA1 digest. The
digest will then be updated provided there are no errors.
See the NOTES section for further details.
-D Set or update any directory SHA1 digests. Use this option
to enable usage of the security.sehash extended attribute.
-l log changes in file labels to syslog.
-m do not read /proc/mounts to obtain a list of non-seclabel
mounts to be excluded from relabeling checks. Setting
this option is useful where there is a non-seclabel fs
mounted with a seclabel fs mounted on a directory below
this.
-n don't change any file labels (passive check).
-o outfilename
Deprecated - This option is no longer supported.
-p show progress by printing the number of files in 1k blocks
unless relabeling the entire OS, that will then show the
approximate percentage complete. Note that the -p and -v
options are mutually exclusive.
-q Deprecated and replaced by -v. Has no effect on other
options or on program behavior.
-r rootpath
use an alternate root path. Used in meta-selinux for
OpenEmbedded/Yocto builds to label files under rootpath as
if they were at /
-s take a list of files from standard input instead of using
a pathname from the command line (equivalent to “-f -” ).
-v show changes in file labels and output any inode
association parameters. Note that the -v and -p options
are mutually exclusive.
-W display warnings about entries that had no matching files
by outputting the selabel_stats(3) results.
-0 the separator for the input items is assumed to be the
null character (instead of the white space). The quotes
and the backslash characters are also treated as normal
characters that can form valid input. This option finally
also disables the end of file string, which is treated
like any other argument. Useful when input items might
contain white space, quote marks or backslashes. The
-print0 option of GNU find produces input suitable for
this mode.
-T nthreads
use up to nthreads threads. Specify 0 to create as many
threads as there are available CPU cores; 1 to use only a
single thread (default); or any positive number to use the
given number of threads (if possible).
ARGUMENTS
spec_file
The specification file which contains lines of the
following form:
regexp [type] context | <<none>>
The regular expression is anchored at both ends.
The optional type field specifies the file type as
shown in the mode field by the ls(1) program, e.g.
-- to match only regular files or -d to match only
directories. The context can be an ordinary
security context or the string <<none>> to specify
that the file is not to have its context changed.
The last matching specification is used. If there
are multiple hard links to a file that match
different specifications and those specifications
indicate different security contexts, then a
warning is displayed but the file is still labeled
based on the last matching specification other than
<<none>>.
pathname ...
The pathname for the root directory of each file system to
be relabeled or a specific directory within a filesystem
that should be recursively descended and relabeled or the
pathname of a file that should be relabeled. Not used if
the -f or the -s option is used.
EXIT STATUS
setfiles exits with status 0 if it encounters no errors. Fatal
errors result in status 255. Labeling errors encountered during
file tree walk(s) result in status 1 if the -C option is
specified and no other kind of error is encountered, and in
status 255 otherwise.
NOTES
1. setfiles operates recursively on directories. Paths leading
up the final component of the file(s) are not canonicalized
before labeling.
2. If the pathname specifies the root directory and the -v
option is set and the audit system is running, then an audit
event is automatically logged stating that a "mass relabel"
took place using the message label FS_RELABEL.
3. To improve performance when relabeling file systems
recursively the -D option to setfiles will cause it to store
a SHA1 digest of the spec_file set in an extended attribute
named security.sehash on each directory specified in
pathname ... once the relabeling has been completed
successfully. These digests will be checked should setfiles
-D be rerun with the same spec_file and pathname parameters.
See selinux_restorecon(3) for further details.
The -I option will ignore the SHA1 digest from each directory
specified in pathname ... and provided the -n option is NOT
set, files will be relabeled as required with the digests
then being updated provided there are no errors.
AUTHOR
This man page was written by Russell Coker
<russell@coker.com.au>. The program was written by Stephen
Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
SEE ALSO
restorecon(8), load_policy(8), checkpolicy(8)
COLOPHON
This page is part of the selinux (Security-Enhanced Linux user-
space libraries and tools) project. Information about the
project can be found at
⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, see
⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Contributing⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2023-05-11.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
10 June 2016 setfiles(8)
Pages that refer to this page: selinux_restorecon_xattr(3), customizable_types(5), fixfiles(8), restorecon(8), restorecon_xattr(8), selinux(8)