> However the current Findutils components do not look at the meta-data > of the files on the filesystems. They only look at file names.
No, they (for example the "find" command) also look at things like size, permissions, accessibility, sparseness, ownership, filesystem name, and so forth. Take a look at the manual page.
Sorry for the confusion. Surely 'find' does look at those things, but by the term 'meta-data', I was referring to things like artist, title, genre (for songs); author (for documents); description, photographer, resolution (for pictures); to, from, subject (for emails); and so on.
> Moreover the presence of > packages like GNU Libextracter > (http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor) make it really easy to > extract the meta-data from various kinds of files using on a X-less > installation. One can keep writing back-ends for handling more and > more file types to Libextractor to broaden its support base.
I'm not familiar with that library, but the web page is not currently working either.
Oops! Maybe you can try this one: http://gnunet.org/libextractor/
We can either modify the existing updatedb and locate tools, or write some separate meta-data capable components for Findutils.
Are you perhaps suggesting that "locate" be enhanced to provide more of the tests offered by "find"?
Yes. I feel is no harm if 'find' can also be enhanced to look at things like artist, title, genre (for songs); author (for documents); description, photographer, resolution (for pictures); to, from, subject (for emails); and so on. But looking at all these things on-the-fly may make 'find' really slow. Therefore to obtain the maximum benefit it may be preferable to have something which maintains an index as 'locate/updatedb' already does. Have I made things a bit clearer now? Regards, Debarshi -- GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7 Key server: pgp.mit.edu _______________________________________________ Bug-findutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
