Why is chattr and lsattr resulting in "Operation not supported while reading flags"?

I'm getting the following error:

$ lsattr /etc/rc.local lsattr: Operation not supported While reading flags on /etc/rc.local $ sudo chattr +i /etc/rc.local chattr: Operation not supported while reading flags on /etc/rc.local 

1 Answer

I did not notice it at the time, but the error was occuring because the file is a symlink:

$ ls -l /etc/rc.local lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 13 Feb 16 2012 /etc/rc.local -> rc.d/rc.local 

Strangely, lsattr on CentOS 5 works on symlinks.