Re: Hello ... tmsu - wildcard question ...

[Paul Ruane]

Hi Victoria,

No, the TMSU mailing list is not deprecated. In not sure why you can't create a new topic via the web interface. You can, however, mail it directly: m...@tmsu.org. Let me know if it doesn't work as sometimes the spam filter picks messages up that it shouldn't. I have copied the mailing list in on this reply to see if it still works.

There is currently no config file. There are three ways of configuring which database to use: via a local .tmsu directory, with the --database option or with the TMSU_ENV environment variable. This is detailed on the wiki: https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/Switching%20Databases.

There is a settings table in the database for configuring which fingerprint algorithm to use and whether tags should be created automatically or not. There is currently no tool for changing settings but there are details how to change these settings on the wiki: https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/Settings. (Eventually this will be possible in TMSU.) As it's a table in the database these settings will be used by anyone using TMSU with that database.

If you tag a directory, only the directory itself will be tagged, not the contents unless you specify the recursive option (--recursive). If you tag only the directory itself, it then doesn't matter what's inside it as any query will return the directory and you can trivially list the files inside:

    tmsu files banana | xargs find

That will list every file matching the tag 'banana' and also list the files in any matching directory.

If you recursively tag a directory and wish to have the files inside tagged too, you will need to periodically use the 'status' subcommand to identify newly added untagged files: there is no daemon file watcher at this time. I would like to eventually add one but I want to get the basics right first as file watchers will only work on some filesystem types, e.g. they could not work on remote filesystems.

Finally, you should not need root to mount the filesystem. It should be possible to do so as a regular use. If you could detail the error you're getting I might be able to help.

Thanks,
Paul

[D Gowers]

>If you tag only the directory itself, it then doesn't matter what's inside it as any query will return the >directory and you can trivially list the files inside:

>    tmsu files banana | xargs find

I want to point out a few things about this commandline:

* it will pick up the initial directory, and any subdirectories, as results, which may be undesirable (usually is for me). If you don't want this behaviour you need something like 'xargs -I "{}" find "{}" -not -type d', or 'xargs -I "{}" find -type f' (the latter if you specifically want only ordinary files, not symlinks etc..)

* xargs command (without -0 or -I option) *breaks on filenames that contain whitespace*. This is intentional, you can read about it in the man page. For example "echo 'foo bar' | xargs printf" passes -two- arguments to printf, even though there is only one newline. printf will promptly complain. Compare with -I: "echo 'foo bar' | xargs -I '{}' printf '{}'" -- a single argument containing both words is passed to printf.

* So usually -I or -0 option is more appropriate, like either this:

 * tmsu files banana | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 find

 * (the tr command converts newlines to nulls)

* or like this:

 * tmsu files banana | xargs -I "{}" find "{}"

Sorry for making things more complicated, but the uncomplicated commandline is, frankly, broken.

David

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[Paul Ruane]

Hi David,

There is a -0 option in TMSU for this. There is no need for tr.

If the behaviour of picking up subdirectories is not desirable then it may be better to tag individual files rather than directories and then not using find.

Paul

[D Gowers]

Both good points (I'd forgotten about tmsu's -0 option because I have a shell alias for that tr command which I use indiscriminately on everything;)).

Anyway, my core point was simply that 'xargs' with no options is unusable for arguments that may contain spaces (such as paths), so being a little more specific is necessary in these cases.

The other bit was just my inner pedant kicking in.