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sveinbjornt / searchfs

Command line tool to quickly search by filename on entire APFS and HFS+ volumes using the file system catalog.
https://sveinbjorn.org/searchfs
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
111 stars 8 forks source link

Support other file systems? #4

Closed dufferzafar closed 5 years ago

dufferzafar commented 5 years ago

This is not really a "issue", and I realise that it's not even a feature request, but I still wanted to discuss the possibilities.

Is it possible to add support for other file systems?

Are there any other file systems which have Catalog of files? I guess NTFS does. (as Everything uses it for search)

But do you know if ext3/4 or any other linux file systems have this?

dufferzafar commented 5 years ago

There are a lot of tools that try to improve upon search times in Linux land, locate is the most famous of them. Which just crawls the entire disk, builds a single database, on which future searches can happen. Updating the database takes ~40 seconds on my machine (and is done at every boot i think.)

If it is even possible, a faster way would be to sift through the file catalog to build a database (this is what Everything does on NTFS.)

sveinbjornt commented 5 years ago

searchfs is intended for use on macOS systems, which typically use either HFS+ or AFPS. The entire point is that it does not perform indexing but rather a live search of the filesystem catalogue. Building a locate-style database and searching it would be a different project altogether, though such a catalogue could certainly be built quickly using searchfs.