Extracting Nautilus / gvfs notes for files

Being able to add notes to any file in Nautilus of the Gnome desktop is such a wonderful thing. But. The implementation is poor to say the least. The notes are not embedded into the file as one might think, like it is normally done with the JPEG files, neither Linux file system extended attributes are used. You can _not_ back the files up in archive without losing the notes, neither you can copy them to an external storage, nor you can even freely move the files around in the same logical disk. You lose notes added to documents if you move them from one user account to another. There is _no warning_.

This sucks.

Even more, rumour says it that the notes feature instead of refining it will be dropped completely soon, but let us wait and see.

Anyway. The good thing is that you _can_ extract the notes from the gvfs virtual file system information and save them in separate text files, if you wish.

Actually the notes are embedded in the constantly changing (?) files which you can find in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata (in Ubuntu 10.10). Look for the files which have in their name the name of the location where your files with the notes are/were located.

Even better, if you have moved some files by accident and your so valued notes are not there any more, don’t panic! They still might be inside the aforementioned files in the gvfs-metadata directory. You also may try moving your files back to their previous location. Very likely that your notes will spring back to life and appear attached to the files again.

Now, here is a simple script assembled from various parts found on Internet, which traverses all the subdirectories of the given directory, looks for information on notes for the particular file in the Nautilus user specific information, extracts it if any and saves it into the text files with the same name, adding a custom extension of *.ntxt (just so that it is easier to distinguish it from other files).

Grab this text, paste it into a new text file, add execution rights for it, then run it from command line and tell it which directory to process:

#!/bin/bash

process_dir() {
 local -a subdirs=()
 echo "Scanning directory: $1"

 # Scan the directory, processing files and collecting subdirs
 for file in "$1"/*; do
 if [[ -f "$file" ]]; then
 echo "Processing file: $file"
 # actually deal with the file here...

 #gvfs-info $file | grep annotation | sed s/' metadata::annotation: '/''/g > $file.note
 note=$(gvfs-info "$file" | grep annotation | sed s/' metadata::annotation: '/''/g)
 #len=`echo ${#note}`
 #echo $len
 if [ -z "$note" ]
 then
 echo "No note for file $file"
 else
 echo "Found a note for file \"$file\", saying: \"$note\""
 echo "$note" > $file.ntext

 fi     # $String is null.

 elif [[ -d "$file" ]]; then
 subdirs+=("$file")
 # If you don't care about processing all files before subfolders, just do:
 # process_dir "$file"
 fi
 done

 # Now go through the subdirs
 for d in "${subdirs[@]}"; do
 process_dir "$d"
 done
}

clear
if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
 read -p "Please enter a directory for me to scan " dir
else
 dir="$1"
fi
process_dir "$dir"

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