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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

If you're skeptical, I was too.

My thoughts before reading the README.md: SQL is nice and all but seems verbose and awkward compared to just using find.

My thoughts after reading the README.md: Wow, this tool can query on file format-specific metadata such as ID3 tags in mp3 files and even width/height in pictures. This is really neat. There is a lot of possibility here.

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Ahh BeFS/BFS. I had my whole MSX-rom collection with file system attributes, including thumbnails

I loved BeOS/BeFS. I remember exporting ID3 tags from mp3 files into file system attributes and querying them to create playlists.

Aside from Haiku, does anyone know if any of the open-source Unix-like operating systems support arbitrary extended file attributes?

It seems like most of them do[1] (inc. ext4, zfs, btrfs), but they’re fairly limited in size (but should be fine for media tags and such).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux

They do.. but integration is almost nonexistent.

All e-mail were separate eml files, with attributes for most of the important data.

Same for contacts.

In BeOS everything was more a file than in most *nix

Not unix-y but OS/2 had something similar.

Of course a built-in would be nice, but I think one could get 99% of the way there just with a specialized scanner (that I don't know the name of) that kept its own database, like CTAGs or the old OSX Quicksilver (and probably Spotlight after it).

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