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posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 04 2015, @07:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the over-to-you dept.

What free software is there in the way of organizing lots of documents?

To be more precise, the ones I *need* to organize are the files on hard drives, though if I could include documents I have elsewhere (bookshelves and photocopy files) I wouldn't mind. They are text documents in a variety of file formats and languages, source code for current and obsolete systems, jpeg images, film clips, drawings, SVG files, files, object code, shared libraries, fragments of drafts of books, ragged software documentation, works in progress ...

Of course the files are already semi-organized in directories, but I haven't yet managed to find a suitable collection of directory names. Hierarchical classification isn't ideal -- there are files that fit in several categories, and there are a lot files that have to be in a particular location because of the way they are used (executables in a bin directory, for example) or the way they are updated or maintained. Taxonomists would advise setting up a controlled vocabulary of tags and attaching tags to the various files. I'd end up with a triples store or some other database describing files.

More down the page...

But how to identify the files being tagged? A file-system pathname isn't enough. Files get moved, and sometimes entire directory trees full of files get moved from one place to another for various pragmatic reasons. And a hashcode isn't enough. Files get edited, upgraded, recompiled, reformatted, converted from JIS code to UTF-8, and so forth. Images get cropped and colour-corrected. And under these changes they should keep their assigned classification tags.

Now a number of file formats can accommodate metadata. And some software that manipulates files can preserve metadata and even allow user editing of the metadata. But more doesn't.

Much of it could perhaps be done by automatic content analysis. Other material may require labour-intensive manual classification. Now I don't expect to see any off-the-shelf solution for all of this, but does anyone have ideas as to how to accomplish even some of this? Even poorly? Does anyone know of relevant practical tools? Or have ideas towards tools that *should* exist but currently don't? I'm ready to experiment.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @03:15AM (#153359)

    I only know Windows and the NTFS filesystem. This filesystem indexes all the file names as metadata at a location of the hard disk known as the "Master File Table". There are tools available such as this one: Everything [voidtools.com] which will bypass the slowdown and bottleneck of the Windows API calls and directly read the file name information from the MFT. This allows blinding fast search results on millions of files and terabyte-sized hard drives.

    I am curious to know if Unix/Linux has an equivalent to this? .....for comparison purposes, it would be a plus if you also have first-hand knowledge of the capabilities of "Everything" on NTFS volumes.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @09:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @09:43AM (#153451)

    Since on Unix, the file name is not a property of the file, but merely of the directory entry pointing to the file (a single file can easily have several different names!) the same cannot exist on Unix/Linux. However there's the locate utility which keeps a separate database of file names (regularly updated via cron job), which effectively does the same job.

  • (Score: 1) by TLA on Thursday March 05 2015, @02:34PM

    by TLA (5128) on Thursday March 05 2015, @02:34PM (#153505) Journal

    I use that, too. Bloody brilliant bit of kit.

    --
    Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander