Bilbo Taggins

A command line tool for descriptively tagging files

About The Project

Taggins is a command line tool that allows you to; create, read, update, and delete descripive tags for your files. It adheres to the Unix philosophy of tools that do one thing really well. Taggins is meant to tie in with other command line tools providing you a way of quickly locating items of interest.

You should probably use taggins if:

• You are a linux user.
• You like stringing together powerful commands in the terminal.
• You have vast amounts of media and need a powerful tool to help you categorize.
• You are a researcher that needs to catagorize files.
• You are a parent that wants to launch a slideshow in < 20 seconds of all pictures with tags: Chester LittleLeague 2019.
• You are a person who likes to categorize things in arbitrary ways.

You may want to move along if:

• You work in Windows exclusively.
• You do not like the command line and the sight of a terminal fills you with chagrin.

Getting Started

This application expects some kind of POSIX environment. Linux is nice and I hear that it's free for the next 24 hours.

To use taggins you must have a file system that supports extended attributes. Taggins maintains a string of one word tags separated by spaces in an extended file attribute. Most (but not all) modern file systems support extended file attributes and have them enabled by default. Don't worry, taggins will let you know.

Installation in any Linux environment

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/bromanbro/taggins.git

2. Move into the project root and build for your system

./configure
make
sudo make install

Usage

Video Demonstration

Some Examples

Add tags to a single file on the command line

taggins -af file1.jpg Florida SummerTime 1975

Add tags to all the files in set

find . -type f | taggins -a WestCoast 2019 MusicFestival

Display the tags for a set of files

find . -type f | taggins

Remove all tags for all files in a set

find . -type f | taggins -d

See the unique tags that you have for a set of files (alias this command to showtags in your .bashrc)

find . -type f | taggins | grep tags | sed -E 's/.*\{//;s/\}//;s/ /\n/g' | sort | uniq

Build a slideshow using fzf and taggins

feh -D 15 `find . -type f | taggins | fzf -m | sed 's/ tags:\{.*\}//'`

Roadmap

• Release usage videos demoing taggins with other command line tools.
• Create a Brew package for installation on Macintosh.

Man Page

NAME

taggins - Descriptively tag all of the things.

SYNOPSIS

taggins [-a|-r|-d] [-f filepath] [tag ...]

DESCRIPTION

taggins takes a stream of paths piped through stdin and performs CRUD operations for a list of descriptive tags. Tags are a list of single words separated by spaces. These tags are kept in the metadata for the files themselves allowing portability. Optionally, you can target a single file at the command line by passing -f filepath. If no options are passed taggins operates in read mode. In this default mode the complete file path is sent to stdout followed by all tags for that file.

Options

• -a
  Add tags. All tags passed are added to the list of tags on a given file.

• -r
  Remove tags. All tags passed are removed from the list of tags on a given file.

• -d
  Delete all tags. All tags on a given file are removed along with the extended attribute that originally stored them.

• -f
  Specify a file. Operate on the file given at the command line rather than processing files piped through stdin.

SEE ALSO

xattr(7), setxattr(2), getxattr(2), listxattr(2), removexattr(2)

BUGS

This program operates by maintaining a string of space delimited tags / words in an extended attribute named user.tags. Extended attributes are available and enabled by default on most (but not all) modern file systems. Taggins will error out and inform the user if extended attributes are not available for a file.

Contact

Dorian Yeager LinkedIn