FAMF: Files As Metadata Format

I know! right?

Some say thay since you can use 'tree' and things like ranger to navigate the files, it should work alright. But I guess if you have one giant metadatafile for all the posts on your blog, it should be much easier to see the whole picture.

As for upd_at, it does not contain information about when the files have been edited, but when the content of the post was meaningfully edited.

So if for example I change the formatting of my times form ISO3339 to another standard, it changes the file metadata, but it does not update the post content, as far as the readers of the blog are concerned with. But I get why you chuckled.

Sure. Why not :))

Sure thing! Awesome!

This is also going to make some devs (me) convulse when a PR is like, "small config change. updated 29 files".

That was my first reaction just by reading the title.

Mostly because I learned the hard way what inodes are.

What would you do with billions of inodes?

Famf is definitely is. Just put yaml there.

/key/=/value

Well, I mostly target the places where you don't programmatically generate millions of values. Configurations, entry metadata, etc. Indeed SQLite is much better for when you have a massive amount of data, and you need a better base that a file system. But when that is not the case, a file system is more advanced than whatever tooling are behind toml and yaml.

OK so, you are very much right. You should definitely benchmark it using a simulation of what your data might look like. It should not be that hard. Just make script, that creates bunch of files similar to your data. About the trailing white space, when I am in terminal I just use sed to remove the latest '\n' and in rust I just use .trim(), in go I think there is strings.trim(). It is honestly not that hard. The data structure and parser is not formed the same way as the json, where you have to parse the whole thing. So you don't have to. You just open the files you need read their content. It is a bit more difficult at first since you can't just translate a whole struct directly, but it pays for itself when you want to migrate the data to a new format. So if your structure never changes, probably those formats are easier.

That quote was in the context of simply separating values with newlines (and the list also included "your language’s split or lines function").

Technically you don't even need awk/sed/fzf, just a loop in bash doing read would allow you to parse the input one line at a time.

while read line; do 
   echo $line # or whatever other operation
done < whateverfile

Also, those manpages are a lot less complex than the documentation for C# or Nushell (or bash itself), although maybe working with C#/nushell/bash is "easy when you’re already intuitively familiar with them". I think the point was precisely the fact that doing that is easy in many different contexts because it's a relatively simple way to separate values.

And like you said: all tooling for files works for this .... For example I use F2 (highly recommended btw) for bulk editing filenames based on regex patterns. This could easily used to edit metadata in bulk.

That's a pretty cool idea!

Definitely. But you would need need something other than those for the working with 100 json files as well. The question is, which kinds of things you would like to have as extra. You can go with jq and prettier syntax highlighting or you can go with tree and cat (and dog). It is the matter of taste. But also, I am always right, because my mom told me I am special .

Yes... "metadata" is becoming an overused term. Not all data is metadata.

My first thought when I read the title was about those .nfo files used by Kodi/Jellyfin and other media centers to keep information relative to the media files.

Yes. That is indeed a more interesting name. But think of the acronym.

• FDS is not as easy to say FAMF.
• FAMF already has an Urban Dictionary entry.