Okay, this one hits the Unix geek in me right where I live.
Some guy at Google recently ported FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to Mac OS X. FUSE is a clean and simple API for implementing file systems (or file system-like views of other things) in Linux, and loads of people have written file systems implemented on top of FUSE. FUSE has also been ported to FreeBSD.
Anyway, I installed it awhile ago. It’s pretty cool. The SSH FUSE file system is useful; I now routinely mount my home directory from our development machine in the corporate office to my Mac, via sshfs. (This technique obviously works really well from a Linux client machine, too.)
Well, the MacFUSE geek recently released another cool FUSE file system: SpotlightFS. Spotlight is the pervasive Mac search engine tool; from the Mac desktop, you can use Spotlight to “find anything on your computer as quickly as you can type” (Apple’s words). Vista has something similar, or so I’ve read.
With SpotlightFS, I get a “file system” mounted under
/Volumes/SpotlightFS. If I create a directory under there, SpotlightFS
performs a search on the term(s) in the directory name and makes links to
all files that match the search. For instance:
$ mkdir /Volumes/SpotlightFS/google
$ ls /Volumes/SpotlightFS/google
:Applications:Google Video Player.app
:Applications:SpotlightFS.app
:Library:Widgets:Google.wdgt
:Users:bmc:Library:Application Support:CrossOver:Bottles:win98:drive_ ...
:Users:bmc:Library:Application Support:CrossOver:Bottles:win98:drive_ ...
:Users:bmc:Library:Application Support:Firefox:Profiles:ti6krs2m.default:cookies.txt
:Users:bmc:Library:Application Support:Google Video Player
:Users:bmc:Library:Application Support:Google Video Player:Uninstall Google Video Player.app
:Users:bmc:Library:Caches:Metadata:Safari:1C0B4B8D-77E5-4305-A776-83DC30769E13.webbookmark
:Users:bmc:Library:Mail:IMAP-bmc@mail.inside.clapper.org:NETBEANS ...
...
I can also create virtual folders (“smart folders”) on the fly;
they don’t show up in an “ls”, but they do return results. All I
have to do is list something under the
/Volumes/SpotlightFS/SmarterFolder directory. Thus, this one
command does exactly what the two commands, above, do:
$ ls /Volumes/SpotlightFS/SmarterFolder/google
Okay, so this seems kind of silly at first; why bother, when there’s friendlier Spotlight GUI integration on the desktop? Well, in two words: power and flexibility. For instance, tonight, my daughter was sitting next to me in my office, playing in TuxPaint, a kid-oriented computer drawing program that’ll run on the Mac. Meanwhile, I was using the keyboard, mouse and monitor attached to my employer-supplied Linux workstation. Naturally, I had a remote login window to the Mac on my Linux desktop. I was searching for a file that had a particular phrase in it. Since my daughter had the desktop, I couldn’t use the Spotlight GUI interface. Normally, in Unix, I’d do something like
$ find . -type f | xargs grep -l foobar
to get a list of files containing “foobar”. But Spotlight is more metadata-aware than grep and, in this particular case, was more likely to get me what I wanted. With SpotlightFS, I was able to use:
$ ls /Volumes/SpotlightFS/SmarterFolder/foobar
There’s the flexibility: the ability to issue powerful Spotlight searches from a simple remotely logged-in command line, without requiring access to the Mac OS X desktop.
As for power, well, I’m already imagining ways that I might integrate Spotlight into shell and Python scripts.