[ruby-talk:10653] File types, filters, input

I'm still toying around with a script that recursively searches
directories for occurrences of patterns. I'd like to improve it so that
it can search compressed files, postscript and other formats that can be
converted to plain text.

Again, I'm not looking for an ad hoc solution, for that I can already
look at Jeffrey Friedl's "search" Perl script, but I'm interested in a
general solution.

I take it, a general solution amounts to something like this:
- Finding the type of a file. (Unix "magic" does this more or less.)
- Registering filters that convert from one type to another
- Finding a (combination of?) filter(s) that converts from one type to
another.
- Transparently hooking a filter into File.read. (Useful, with code that
itself doesn't care for filtering.)

I don't think there's a generic way to do this on Linux/Unix, but maybe
there's a good way to do it in Ruby.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:[e-mail]
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/