Re: [9fans] some shell scripts

[Martin C.Atkins <martin_ml@parvat.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:38:15 -0400 Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com> wrote:
>...
> Second, inspired by reading about Nemo's tags,
> I realized that, on Unix, I use locate | grep way too much
> and I'm sick of typing really long path names.

Reading about Nemo's tags, and Russ' L, I wonder what people here think
about Beagle? (see:
	http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/
)

I saw a demo a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite impressive.
Especially impressive was the fact that search results were updated
dynamically (within ~1/2s) when (matching) files were
created/destroyed.

This pretty-much requires a mechanism for the kernel to tell a user
process about changes to the filesystem, which sounds horrible, but
seems to work (they use inotify. Windows, apparently, has had such a
mechanism for years). Obviously, one does not want this to recurse :-(

What would be the "Plan 9 way" of achieving this? I can't see how
binding a fileserver on / (or even on my home directory) could have
reasonable performance, even if it could be made to have the right
semantics! Running a full filesystem scan every 0.1s would not be
very attractive! :-)

Note that Beagle searches more than just the filesystem, but that's
another story. All in all, Beagle-like facilities do look rather
attractive - it's sort of a super-google (i.e. uses google to search
the web. It can also search all/only the webpages that you have
visited - now that's something I really need :-)!

Martin
-- 
Martin C. Atkins				martin@parvat.com
Parvat Infotech (Private) Limited		http://www.parvat.com