File attributes are a type of metadata that describe and may modify how files and/or directories in a filesystem behave. Typical file attributes may, for example, indicate or specify whether a file is visible, modifiable, compressed, or encrypted. The availability of most file attributes depends on support by the underlying filesystem (such as FAT, NTFS, ext4) where attribute data must be stored along with other control structures. Each attribute can have one of two states: set and cleared. Attributes are considered distinct from other metadata, such as dates and times, filename extensions or file system permissions. In addition to files, folders, volumes and other file system objects may have attributes.

In Unix and Unix-like systems, including POSIX-conforming systems, each file has a 'mode' containing 9 bit flags controlling read, write and execute permission for each of the file's owner, group and all other users (see File-system permissions §Traditional Unix permissions for more details) plus the setuid and setgid bit flags and a 'sticky' bit flag. The mode also specifies the file type (regular file, directory, or some other special kind).

In 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite, files and directories (folders) accepted four attributes that could be set by the owner of the file or the superuser (the "User" attributes) and two attributes that could only be set by the superuser (the "System" attributes):

FreeBSD added some additional attributes, also supported by DragonFly BSD:

FreeBSD also supports:

whereas DragonFly BSD supports:

NetBSD added another attribute, also supported by OpenBSD:

macOS added three attributes: