Neversearch

Provide a way to easily find / tag files and folders on UNIX systems with xattr support on filesystems. Currently known to work on Linux.

Features

Future work

Dependencies

Media

Neversearch @ Openfest 2013: http://va.ludost.net/files/of2013/Day1/Hall_Sofia/05.Lightning/03.Neversearch%20-%20Merlijn%20Wajer.mp4

Code

http://github.com/MerlijnWajer/neversearch

Example

Tagging files

Adding a tag is as simple as: 

$ tag -a my_brand_new_tag my_file

Doing the same, recursively: 

$ tag -ra 2013 ~/photos

Unicode is supported, too! 

$ tag -a ♥ ~/photos/wizzup.png

Listing tags

Listing tags: 

$ tag -l ~/photos/wizzup.png
~/photos/wizzup.png: 2013, ♥

Recursively listing tags: 

$ tag -rL ~
# (output not shown)

The difference between -L and -l is simple: -L omits files that contain no tags, whereas -l does not.

Deleting tags

$ tag -d ♥ ~/photos/wizzup.png
$ tag -C ~/photos/wizzup.png

Finding and filtering

Filters use regular expressions (Regex): 

$ tag -rHf python /tmp/
/tmp/foo (python)
/tmp/foo/quux (python)
/tmp/foo/bar (python)
/tmp/foo/bar/wobble (python)
/tmp/foo/bar/fred (python)

Having neversearch read files from stdin is also possible: 

$ find /tmp/ | tag -f python
/tmp/bar/foo
/tmp/bar/foo/quux
/tmp/bar/foo/bar
/tmp/bar/foo/bar/wobble
/tmp/bar/foo/bar/fred

And finally, you can chain neversearch: 

$ tag -rf python /tmp/foo | tag -f 2012 | tag -L
/tmp/foo/quux: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar/wobble: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar/fred: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo: python, 2014, 2012

Export

Exporting is very useful if you are planning to copy tags to a filesystem that does not support extended attributes (xattr). You can save the filenames and the associated tags to a file and later on apply the tags again when you have a filesystem that does support xattr.

Be careful if you want an absolute or relative path:

Absolute: 

$ tag -rE /home/user/my_photos > /home/user/photo_tags

Relative: 

$ cd /home/user/my_photos
$ tag -rE . > /home/user/photo_tags

They are very different. I would recommend using relative where possible. If you use relative, make sure you are in the proper folder when importing, too

You can again also use find and have neversearch read from stdin. This way you can also exclude paths using grep. 

$ find /path | grep -v '/path/some_path' | tag -E > /home/user/photo_tags

Import

See the above section on exporting. Assume we've stored tags in /home/user/photo_tags 

$ tag -V -I /home/user/photo_tags

Remove the -V flag if you do not care about verbosity.

Database?

$ tag -rL /tmp > udb
…
$ grep python udb
/tmp/foo: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/quux: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar/wobble: python, 2014, 2012
/tmp/foo/bar/fred: python, 2014, 2012

Presentation

http://wizzup.org/neversearch.pdf

Progress

neversearch (last edited 2014-01-08 22:49:41 by MerlijnWajer)