SPUG: Adapting tagsfs

[Christopher Howard]

Question: Have any of you played around with document management using Perl?

Reason I ask:  Over my college years I've downloaded and scanned a large 
number scholarly documents and photos.  (At least 1500 files, I 
think.)   Until now, my strategy for managing those documents has been 
to organize them into a traditional subject-based hierarchy of 
directories. But it has become quite difficult to maintain such order, 
and find things in it.

I'd like to take a different approach.  I want to keep all my documents 
in one directory (or as few as possible), and organize and search 
through them with some kind of external meta-data system.  The idea is 
to be able to find documents I'm look for using tags, such as keywords.

One thought I had was to use somekind of Perlish interface to a MySQL 
database, with the meta-data residing inside the MySQL database.  
Another thought was to use XML files that stand along-side the real 
files, with the meta-data inside XML tags.  I've actually put a little 
work towards the latter option, as it seemed very easy to set up.

Also, another Linux user suggested this:
https://gna.org/projects/tagsfs/
I'm not real familiar with tagsfs, but apparently it uses FUSE and some 
Perl bindings to organize music files.  He thought I might be able to 
adapt it to my needs by editing the code.  (This approach doesn't seem 
real attractive to me, but I thought I'd mention it in case it really 
was a good idea.)

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