Filesystem Indexing with libferris

For this example, I use my user name and a dbname of lj. The second command below creates the EA index using the non-interactive fcreate tool. The third command then adds all the JPEG files in my shared image directory to that index. You also can use feaindexadd with the -d option to list file paths explicitly on the command line. Without -d, feaindexadd tries to recurse into the paths you supply:

$ mkdir /tmp/ea-index
$ fcreate --create-type=eaindexpostgresql \
--target-path=/tmp/ea-index dbname=lj user=ben
# if you have setup new db, append  db-exists=1
$ find /usr/share/backgrounds/images \
-name "*.jpg" \
| feaindexadd -P /tmp/ea-index --filelist-stdin

My image directory contains 42 JPEG images. Here, I query the index:

$ feaindexquery -P /tmp/ea-index '(width>=640)'
Found 34 matches at the following locations:
file:///usr/share/backgrounds/images/dewdop_leaf.jpg
...
$ feaindexquery -P /tmp/ea-index '(size>=100k)'
Found 42 matches at the following locations:
file:///usr/share/backgrounds/images/dewdop_leaf.jpg
...
$ feaindexquery -P /tmp/ea-index \
'(&(width<=800)(size>=100k))'
Found 19 matches at the following locations:
file:///usr/.../images/space/apollo08_earthrise.jpg
...

The EA index query syntax is based on “The String Representation of LDAP Search Filters” as described in RFC 2254. This is a simple syntax, providing a small set of comparative operators to make lvalue operator rvalue terms and a means to combine these terms with Boolean and (&), or (|) and not (!) operations. All terms are contained in parentheses, with operators preceding their arguments. The operators are kept simple: == for equality, <= and >= for value ranges and =~ for regex matches.

The ODBC (optionally) and PostgreSQL (always) EA indexing plugins allow you to store many versions of EAs for a file in the index. Having many versions of metadata for a file allows you to query for files based on the EA values those files once had.

To use this functionality, you have to select a time range to match the search against when querying by using a special EA. The time-restricting EAs are atime, ferris-current-time, multiversion-mtime and multiversion-atime. The last two EAs match against the mtime and atime for the file you are seeking. The ferris-current-time EA for a version of a file's index data is the time when that file was being indexed. If no time range is selected, only the latest version of metadata for each file is considered when executing a query.

Time restrictions can be given as a string, and libferris tries its best to work out the format of your time string. In the tests/timeparsing directory of the libferris distribution is a timeparse tool that accepts time values and tells you what libferris makes of your time string. More details on the permissible time strings are given in the libferris FAQ item (see Resources).

The following example of a time-based query looks for all image files that were indexed over a year ago with a given width range:

$ feaindexquery -P /tmp/ea-index \
 '(&(width>=1600)(ferris-current-time<=1 year ago))'

If a large image file was indexed two years ago and subsequently replaced with a thumbnail image and re-indexed, the above query returns the file. This is because one of its versions of metadata matches the given query.

Handling the time restriction for EA queries by using the same interface as querying on EA values allows you to use all the standard query mechanisms to select your matching time range. For example, I could select documents that were indexed in 2003 with a given width or those with a specific owner that were modified in the last month:

## note, all one line
$ feaindexquery -P /tmp/ea-index '
(|
  (&
    (width>=1600)(ferris-current-time>=begin 2003)
    (ferris-current-time<=end 2003)
  )
  (&
    (owner-name==sarusama)
    (multiversion-mtime>=end last month)
  )
)