From a discussion on #gnome at GimpNet (irc.gnome.org)
December 30th, 2003

Roey, the author of scripts here has to say this about them:

<Roey> they need a big 'beware these are hacky and ugly'

So, here it goes:

BEWARE THESE ARE HACKY AND UGLY


And before that he had something more on the positive side to say:

<Roey> so Gnome devs were talking about making a standard convention for attribute names.. whatever became of it? or you said you didnt' know
<Roey> after making these tools ('ea' for setting lists=of,key=val pairs and 'kw' for setting list,of,key,words) I'm ready to start categorizingthe hell out of my files:)
<Roey> they use python's xattr module
<Roey> and python 2.3
<Roey> fileutils need to support EAs just so that if you mv/cp your files, they won't lose their EA data ;)
<Roey> debian sid's fileutils support them
<Roey> they're really really simple scripts
<Roey> one is < 160 and the other is <200 and that's with  a big GPL paragraph at the beginning
<Roey> but you can do this:
<Roey> say you want to add a comment to some files
<Roey> ea -a subject="pictures from 2003 Russia visit" *.jpg 
<Roey> ea -a comment="big boring city" city.jpg
<Roey> or you can ea -d comment *.jpg  to remove the comments
<Roey> now say you want to add keywords:
<Roey> kw -a lesbian,proshoot,interracial *.jpg
<Roey> then you can query:
<Roey> which pictures from this dir on down show lesbians?
<Roey> kw -rq lesbians *
<Roey> or kw -rq lesbians


So folks, go play with it, and blame Roey if you screw something up.