Re: File Notes

["Manon Metten" <manon.metten@gmail.com>]

Hi Deboo,

On 5/30/07, Deboo ^ <knowledgeful@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you detail a bit about this file notes thing a bit more? What all
does it let you do? Does it have to be in the FS only? Can it not be a
software package?

An AmigaDOS file note surely is a file system thing, it's certainly no software package, although I can use some DOS commands to read/write a file note (LIST, FILENOTE).
 

From the AmigaDOS manual (I omitted the irrelevant parts):

FILENOTE

Format: FILENOTE [FILE] <file|pattern> [COMMENT] <comment> [ALL|QUIET]

Template: FILE/A, COMMENT, ALL/S, QUIET/S

Purpose: To attach a comment to a file.

Specification:

"FILENOTE attaches an optional comment of up to 79 characters to the specified file or to all files matching the given pattern.

If the <comment> includes spaces it must be enclosed in double quotes...

If the <comment> argument is omitted, any existing file note will be deleted from the named file.

...

When an existing file is copied to (specified as the TO argument of a COPY command), it will be overwritten, but its original comment will be retained. Any comment attached to a FROM file will not be copied unless the CLONE or COM option of COPY is specified.

If the ALL option is given, FILENOTE will add the <comment> to all the files in the specified directory. ...



So a file note is some kind of a sub file that belongs specifically to one and only one single file, although every file can have its own file note (which btw. may all have the same contents). If a file is created from scratch, it has no file note by default. But when I set a file note for that file, it will stick to it whatever I do with that file.

Eg. say I have "Firefox" downloaded from the Mozilla website and save it to an empty dir called "Downloads". If I want to remember where it came from, I can set the file note to: "
http://download.mozilla.org" (actually my web browser does this automatically for me). Still the "Downloads" dir has only one file in it.

FILENOTE  firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz  
http://download.mozilla.org


If I examine the Downloads dir using the LIST command I get the following output:

List Downloads

firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz     9.2MB   ----rwed   31-05-2007 22:34:18
http://download.mozilla.org

The first line tells me the file name, the file size, some flags and the date & time of creation of the file (ie. on my system, that is when the download started). The second line tells me where the file came from.

Wherever I copy the file (using my dir util), the file note goes with it. If I use the COPY command, I have to specify the COM or CLONE option to copy the file note with it. If I delete the file, the file note is gone too. If I overwrite the 
firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz file, the file note will not be changed.

File notes come in handy when I eg. burn an mp3 cd. If I would have the files stored with their song name, the cd would end up with alfabetically ordered songs. So I number them in the order I want and have a file note telling me the artist name, song name and release date of the song, eg:

List CD0:

01.mp3  The Knack: My Sharona (1979)
02.mp3  Kajagoogoo: Too Shy (1983)
03.mp3  Soul II Soul: Back To Life (1989)
...

This goes way much faster than what Konqueror does (reading all mp3's ID tags), coz the OS reads an entire dir including all file notes. My dir util displays both the file names and file notes in separate columns. I can even search on file notes. So when I eg. want to know what number the song "Back To Life" is, I search for that phrase in the file notes and the output will be "
03.mp3".



That's my note on the File Notes theme.

Greetings, Manon.