ft - file tag

A proof-of-concept “pure bash” file tagging tool. If you’re looking for a production-ready file tagging system I would recommend tmsu. While relatively portable it relies on some newer tools in coreutils.

A friend asked me why I used linux, and I responded by saying that I like that I can easily build tools for it. When they asked what tools I’d written lately I had no interesting answer so here is something.

Usage: ft { -a tagN,... | -d tagN,... | -l file | -f tag | -c | -u }

How it works

Tags are symlinks to a file that are stored in a .tags/ sub-directory in a directory that we want to manage. The tag naming convention is {tag}_{inode}_filename. Since a file’s inode never changes as long as it is on the same file system, we can refer to it in the tag to repair broken symlinks if files are moved around.

Example

Here is a directory with two files that have some tags on them:

somedir
├── somefile
├── someotherfile
└── .tags
    ├── bad_10097338_someotherfile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/someotherfile
    ├── boring_10097338_someotherfile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/someotherfile
    ├── cool_10097336_somefile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/somefile
    ├── great_10097336_somefile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/somefile
    ├── neat_10097336_somefile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/somefile
    └── sad_10097338_someotherfile -> /home/patrick/ft/somedir/someotherfile

You can add tags with -a, list tags on a file with -l, and remove them with -d:

$ ft -a some,random,tags somefile 
$ ft -l somefile
random,tags,neat,cool,some,great
$ ft -d some,random,tags somefile
$ ft -l somefile
neat,cool,great

You can look up files by tag with -f:

$ ft -f cool
/home/patrick/ft/somedir/somefile

Untagged files can be listed with -u, and broken tags can be cleaned up with -c.

Todo’s

• currently there is no method for repairing broken symlinks by referring to

inode+filename.