From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:59:26 +0530 From: Martin C.Atkins To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] some shell scripts Message-Id: <20041014105926.08edbf1f.martin_ml@parvat.com> In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: ed5aaa50-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Hi, On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:38:15 -0400 Russ Cox 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