http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/pythonmetadataimporter.html
I really dig the Spotlight Metadata Importer for python, but it only works for files ending in ".py" which excludes various shell scripts I have written that have no filename extension. Anyone have a super elegant solution to this problem? Here's my thoughts on the matter. To my knowledge, Mac OS X has only three ways of knowing the type of a file: the HFS type code, the filename extension, and the presence of an executable bit on a file* (in order of precidence). I've already nixed filename extensions and the executable bit only seems to be able to identify something as a "Unix Executable File". So, that leaves HFS type codes. The first question is whether this is an HFS type code lying around from the days of yore that identified a python executable script? If not, would anyone mind if I registered one? (Once we've got a suitable type code, modifying the Spotlight Metadata Importer to claim it is no big deal). The more challenging part is to actually affix that type code on all extension-less python executables; As far as Mac OS X is concerned these files have no type, so there isn't a trivial way to write a script that would search for them and tag them. Using spotlight, you can at least limit your search to text and executable files, but you would still need to example their contents individually to know whether they should be tagged. This script would have to be run periodically or, if you put all such scripts in a common location you could create a launch item for it. As a crazy alternative to all of the above, the python metadata importer could be written to work in conjunction with spotmeta (http://www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta/) to additionally run on all text or executable files and only add the python metadata if the file actually is a python file. Not that I'm suggesting this be done or anything, but I think its an interesting idea. Hopefully Leopard will provide a more elegant solution to this problem. Nick Matsakis * The saddest part of this story is that /usr/bin/file has been on Mac OS X since day one and understands perfectly well what a "a python script text executable" is. Yet, when the Finder encounters a file without an extension or HFS code rather than, say, looking at the file to see what kind it is, it absolves all responsibility and forces you to find an application that might open it. _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
