Skip to content

Manual

Quick Manual

Adding paths, indexing files and housekeeping

Open a terminal, and add one or more media-paths be scanned for files:

cd ~/Music
tagfile add .
tagfile add ~/Videos

This will only save a reference to the directory. To actually walk through the directories and hash the files to get checksums, you can use the updatedb command. This will recursively scan all media-paths you've added and may take some time, especially the first time.

For both the prune and scan actions, progressbars will be shown with estimates of the remaining time to complete. Add a --verbose flag to also output every filename and actions performed. Use Ctrl+C to cancel. All progress already done will be saved.

tagfile updatedb

To see statistics of indexed files and a list of media-paths:

tagfile info

Finding duplicate files with clones command

Show duplicate files using the clones command with/without option flags (see tagfile help clones to see all available options):

tagfile clones

Show hash, path, size and full MIME-type (using long opts):

tagfile clones --show-size -show-mime

Show hash, path, size and first part of MIME-type (using short opts):

tagfile clones -st

Usage examples: listing, searching and filtering files

The list and find commands are the most important part of tagfile and probably the reason why you might want to use it. What follows are some usage examples with both short and long optional arguments.

List all files sorted by filesize (showing checksum, filesize and mimetype columns):

tagfile list -aS size
tagfile list --show-all --sort=size

List all files with MIME-type text/plain sorted by filesize from small to big (showing checksum, filesize and mimetype columns):

tagfile find --mime text/plain -a -S size
tagfile find --mime=text/plain -show-all --sort=size

List all files, sorted by filetype (showing checksum, size and type):

tagfile list -HstS type
tagfile list --show-hash --show-size --show-type --sort=type

List all videos larger than 100MB, sorted by filesize from big to small (showing type and filesize):

tagfile find --type video --size-gt 104857600 -stS size --reverse
tagfile find --type video --size-gt 104857600 --show-size --show-type --sort=size --reverse

Relation between media-paths, databases and config files

By default, tagfile uses one config file and one database.

A config file:

  • Contains a single set of ignore rules for all databases.
  • Defines one or more databases. New databases must be defined in the config [databases] section with a name = "location-path" key-value pair.
  • Can be specified with the tagfile --config=FILENAME option

A database:

  • Can contain zero, one or multiple media-paths.
  • The most used commands/actions (add, find, list and updatedb) are performed in a database-wide scope.

  • The default database to use can be:

    • configured in the config file default_database = "name" setting.
    • specified with the tagfile --config=FILENAME option

A media-path is a parent directory that contains one or more files you want to index. By scanning with updatedb, tagfile will walk recursively through all subdirectories and add any file that does not match the ignore rules from the config. Any files that are indexed but removed in the filesystem itself afterwards, will be pruned from the index on the next run of updatedb.