An Oberon tool to tag files by using file system extended attributes.

This video presents how it works: https://toobnix.org/w/43z3xJSwZRU2iBNZPZkChv

Did you try to organize your film/book/music library? Or your own photos? By year? By camera? by place?

How do you classify the films: By director? By Country? By language? By actors? By scriptwriter?

With Etiquette tool you can tag one file as director: Larry David, and other file as: Actor: Larry David.

Then you can list the files where LD is an actor, and list files where LD is a director. Same with languages, countries of production and any other taxonomy you want.

It stores the data in the modern Unix File System Extended Attributes. Other solutions I found were storing tags in the separate db. That means each time you move the file, the db record has to be changed. Then you have to copy/move files with some specific ui or cmdline programs, in order to preserve the tags.

With this solution you just use your any file manager, cp, mv commands, etc. The tags will follow.

For a regular end user, I am writing a UI program, with which one can organize everything: clothes, books, films, whatever.

It's not possible to query Unix File System for xattrs. We need to search in the current directory (recoursively? should i add it?) for the files that have specified tag.

My research shows that Haiku file system has this option.

Ports to other Unix systems are in process. just xattr.Mod for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Illumos, MacOS needs to be written. You are welcome to contribute! I think it'll also work on Windows, since NTFS has xattrs.

Oberon has this cool feature: you can have files like xattrsLinux.Mod and xattrsFreeBSD.Mod but the module name inside the module is mentioned as MODULE xattrs; then the module will compile to xattrs.o which we'll be able to later link to our resulting program.

options:

-a, --add = VALUE
               add a tag
-f, --file = VALUE
               <no description>
-d, --delete = VALUE
               <no description>
-C, --clear
               <no description>
-l, --list
               <no description>
-F, --filter = VALUE
               filter files by tag
-h, --help
               show this help
-p, --prefix = VALUE
               specify xattr namespace
-v, --verbose
               verbose output

Inspired by Wizzup's python tag tool.