On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 08:11:37PM +0800, Sacha Chua wrote:
> eric pareja <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> >> > I've been wondering if there is any version of ls that works like dir
> >> Isn't this similar to how things are handled under UMSDOS filesystems?
> > er... no. that's for long filenames. the description field contains more
> > meta-data than can be fit in a filename (even long filenames have
> > their disadvantages).
> 
> Oh, you mean _descriptions_ descriptions! Summaries, keywords and
> stuff! =) You're probably more interested in... umm... I don't know of
> any ls work-alike that does that, but I suspect that a database-like
> filesystem would be able to do something of the sort. Basically, have
> no current clue, but can see usefulness of such. (I'd love to be able
> to grep the description too...)

yes. i finally wrote a no brainer and brainless script to do just this.
descriptions of files will be contained in .description of the current
working dir.

>> lsd << ls with descriptions

----> script starts here <---
#!/bin/sh
ls | join -a 1 - .description
----> eof <---

additional commands to write/rewrite would be "describe" and
what other commands affected by this .description thing? for example,
you'd need to modify mv; if you mv a file from one dir to another, it
should be smart enough to likewise move the .description entry for the
mv'ed file to the target dir.

the neat thing about using .description is that it's in text, so you
can do all sorts of processing on that with other tools. you can
extend other existing file management utilities (GUI or non-GUI) to
include the use of .description. the whole point is that you're adding
meta-data that is presently not defined in our filesystems that can
still be useful to us humans.


eric
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