Turn cached indexes into offline databases (locate, browse, ...) #263

bitozoid commented 2025年07月03日 22:35:08 +02:00 (Migrated from code.blicky.net)

This is an idea / feature request, that I found no better way to share.

ncdu already can store an index of the contents of a file system. If I stow away an HDD (set it offline) but keep the ncdu index, I can use ncdu to recover and browse the contents of my archived HDD.

I wonder whether the index could be used as the 'mlocate' tool index to search also for files, or just to be dumped as the output of the find command to be grepped.

I think that a "search/locate" feature or a "dump list" (to grep later) would be a great idea.

To be more imaginative, the index even could be mounted as FUSE (not real files) so the find and locate commands could be run directly on it.

This is an idea / feature request, that I found no better way to share. ncdu already can store an index of the contents of a file system. If I stow away an HDD (set it offline) but keep the ncdu index, I can use ncdu to recover and browse the contents of my archived HDD. I wonder whether the index could be used as the 'mlocate' tool index to search also for files, or just to be dumped as the output of the find command to be grepped. I think that a "search/locate" feature or a "dump list" (to grep later) would be a great idea. To be more imaginative, the index even could be mounted as FUSE (not real files) so the find and locate commands could be run directly on it.

yorhel commented 2025年07月04日 06:08:12 +02:00 (Migrated from code.blicky.net)

I'm not yet sure if it's worth implementing such functionality directly into ncdu. ncdutils is a separate tool I wrote to experiment with extra dump-related tooling, but it's still very incomplete. At least it can already do the "dump list" part for binary exports.

I'm not yet sure if it's worth implementing such functionality directly into ncdu. [ncdutils](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdutils) is a separate tool I wrote to experiment with extra dump-related tooling, but it's still very incomplete. At least it can already do the "dump list" part for binary exports.

bitozoid commented 2025年07月04日 11:21:25 +02:00 (Migrated from code.blicky.net)

Great! I had some trouble compiling crystal but finally it worked.

./ncdutils find my-binary

Thanks a lot.

Great! I had some trouble compiling crystal but finally it worked. ``` ./ncdutils find my-binary ``` Thanks a lot.