I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my rep is a testament to that I guess ;) ) – both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by).
Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question – which went like –
I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.
Now me being a KDE user I had noticed this but never paid much attention. This piqued my interest, and I fired a quick search on “notes in gnome file properties” – this returned few results, all of them corroborating that the meta data is stored in an XML file in ~/.nautilus/metafiles. So I told him about the location. He replies stating that the path does not exist and ~/.nautilus is empty. Now that prompted me to get off my Windows partition and boot into Gnome ( probably the second time that I’ve booted into it after installing Ubuntu – as I said above I’m more of a KDE guy :-) ) and find out for myself where this is.
First thing I did run a system wide find for metafiles folder:
find / -iname metafiles
That didn’t return anything, so I went back to the big G and searched deeper, to find this launchpad answer :
This is handled in gvfs now, and the information is stored in ~/.local/shared/gvfs-metadata
And indeed, it was
Unfortunately, given the data stored against it, I don’t think it would be possible to parse out the Notes data (The note I had saved was “where will this note be saved?”).
Just another thing you learn every day :)
You can use the `gvfs-info` tool from the `gvfs-bin` package to query files, e.g. to retrieve all metadata:
$ gvfs-info -a “metadata::*” .
attributes:
metadata::annotation: This is the note.
Thanks for the tip, Bruce!
Thank you so much. I was stumped on this for a bit until I found your blog, using the big “G” :) Now I just have to figure out how to back them up to dropbox so that when I restore an ubuntu install in the future, all my notes come back. I wonder if I have to allow dropbox 777 access to the “gvfs-metadata” folder. You saved me so much time though. Thanks again!
Great tip, thanks very much!