From: Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...>
Date: 2002-06-02T13:52:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Finding all applications

On 6/1/02 7:44 PM, "Dossy" <dossy@panoptic.com> wrote:

> Did Mac (HFS I'm assuming) index the filesystem and allow searching
> of the index (I think BeOS had this functionality)?

Basically yes. There is API for treating the filesystem as a database.
Sherlock exposes this API to the user but any app can use it as well.
 
> In FAT, NTFS and most Unix filesystems, there's no indexing so to
> locate objects you have to traverse the whole filesystem.

Maybe that explains why I kept losing files on my PC. If there wasn't really
anything in the filesystem itself that kept track of where a file was in the
directory hierarchy. This information must have been in the registry?

I guess efs doesn't really have anything like that either, now that you
mention it. From a given file of directory you can trace up the file
hierarchy because you have that information encoded in it's full path name
but you can't search down the hierarchy without using the expensive method
that find is using. I remember that efs didn't have aliases and symlinks
aren't the same thing.

I expect to be able to search a 50 gig HD in milliseconds for queries like
"show me all the documents originally created with application X" or "show
me all the programs that the current user has permission to execute". I've
done this kind of thing before and had those results. Unfortunately, the
techniques didn't stick in my head that well and the API changed a little
for OSX so I'm going to have to modify my old code.

NTFS, according to people who should know, really does have all the
capabilities built in. Their simply aren't any applications that use them
including WinXP itself.
-- 

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