/tag-file

Add tags to filenames

Primary LanguageJavaScript

tag-file

ClI tool / library to store tags directly in the filenames (ex: test#foo.txt).

Why?

I wanted to tag my files to retrieve them easily on cross platform. I searched a sexy solution like Mac OS has but I didn't find any.

Here is the list of alternatives I found.

Extended attributes

Extended attributes (shortened xattr) are used to store metadata of the files. It's a simply key/value storage related to a file or a folder.

Linux supports it with EXT4 or ZFS filsystem and MacOS with HFS+ or APFS. But Windows (with NTFS) does not support it.

Extended attributes is an hackable solution since they can be used thought CLI tools xattr. Thus you can easily write them using setfattr and read them using setfattr 1.

It doesn't fit my need because:

  1. extended attributes are not saved into the file. It means that even cp doesn't copy extended attributes when file move to a different storage (apparently you need to use rsync -X instead...). TODO verify
  2. This is not possible on Android. I tried using Termux on Android and I got unsupported error
  3. They are not saved in every cloud provider / FS types 2

TagSpace

TagScape is a cross-platform open-source software which offer two approach to tags files everywhere.

It offers two way to handle tags:

  1. filename, The first approach is really simple. If you want to add tag work to foo.txt, you simply rename your file foo[work].txt. That's it. It seems dumb at first but it's not.
  2. sidecar, The first approach is to add a JSON by the file. So if you want to tag foo.txt, TagSpace will create a file foo.txt.json.

It doesn't fit me because the filename convention they use is not really hackable for me. It's difficult to find a tag using the search tool in Nautilus for example.

Symlinks

A common idea is to use symbolic links to tag your files.

For instance, you create a top level folder tags/ . if you want to tag your file foo.txt as work, you simply create a new folder tags/work and make a symlink

./tags/work/foo.txt -> ./foo.txt

It is easy to script using a shell script. But it doesn't work on Android. Also, symlink are weak and may be broken if your rename/move/destroy the original file.

Footnotes

  1. Bash script example to read/write EXT4 extended attributes https://bougui505.github.io/2017/09/12/tagging_files_using_ext4_extended_file_attributes.html ↩

  2. https://eclecticlight.co/2018/01/12/which-file-systems-and-cloud-services-preserve-extended-attributes/ ↩