Shell examples

From Meta Desktop

There needs to be full command line support, but thinking about it, that shouldn't be too difficult, especially if system files retain their tree-ness. The / convention would be kept.

Command-line should be extended to cope with metadata/tags. Command line could still access files:

/dir/dir/file

[edit] Duplicate naming

Currently you can have directory1/file and directory2/myfile, but not directory1/myfile and directory1/myfile

So, there should be a system name and a 'friendly' name. so myfile could indeed exist in the same location and would show up as,

myfile
myfile

When really it would be:

f0000 > myfile
ff000 > myfile

the first attribute being the 'real' system name and the second one the friendly name. (I understand filesystems already deploy this tactic anyway.)

[edit] Navigation

Command line navigation by tag would be conceptually quite easy:

$ ls --tag project
myfile1

File listing could also show tags

-rwxr-xr-x 1 mark mark 136 Nov 5 2007 f0000 myfile, local, project, photo, gimp

Here the 'friendly name' is really just a tag.

In fact, if you know there's a certain file (myfile) that would be in, say /home/mark/Documents/bla/bla/ you could look directly in the main pool

$ ls myfile
myfile (~/Documents/bla/bla/)
myfile (/usr/local/)

Extra information might show where the file would be in the hierarchy.

Smart directories might be made with a switch on mkdir

$ mkdir --smart tag-photo+tag-project
$ mkdir --smart tag-photo|tag-project etc.

---

Next: Existing Applications