TagFS - Limit View on Filesystem by Tags

TagFS is a filesystem in userspace. It takes an existing directory with tags and allows to limit the view on this filesystem by tags.

• tags are read from a file in each directory named .tags
• tags can be combined by + or -, for example music+electronic-minimal would show only files which have tags music and electronic but not minimal
• at the root of the filesystem the tags can be selected, i.e. cd /mountpoint/music+electronic-minimal/ contains the original files limited by the tags
• the root of the filesystem lists all available tags

Usage

Compile extension:

$ make

Tag files:

echo tag1 >> /files/foo/.tags
echo tag2 >> /files/foo/bar/.tags
echo tag2 >> /files/baz/.tags

Mount filesystem:

$ ./mount /files /mountpoint

Note: The tag files are read only once and are cached thereafter. Only remounting helps currently.

Unmount filesystem:

$ fusermount -u /mountpoint

TODO / Planned Features

• allow to tag files (currently only directories)
• different options to store the tags (per-directory or central database)
• writable filesystem (currently only the basic read operations are implemented)
• reload tags as necessary
• improve performance to compute tags of directories
• maybe organize tags as trees
• custom event loop instead of fuse_main so signals can be handled properly