I once used BeOS to categorise my digital photo collection by adding three simple attributes to a new mime type. These attributes were “who, where, and when” – two string attributes and a time attribute.
Three years later and I need to get the date and time information from 300 photos. The information was there in Tracker but from the Terminal catattr would just show me raw information.

Previously I had worked on an editor of attributes called AttributeEdit that was aware of which attributes that a file had belonged to its mime type and which were extra attributes. So I wrote a new version of catattr that would show me the time information and a version of listattr that showed a friendly name for certain attribute types rather than just the hexcode. It also showed whether an attribute was part of the files mime type or was part of BeOS, tracker, or was foreign.

First version (v0.1) can be found here.

features

attr_tools is a rewrite of the _attr commands to view and manipulate attributes.

• The contents of more attribute types can be seen from the Terminal.
• It is clear which attributes belong to the mime type and which do not.
• More hexadecimal type codes are replaced with friendlier names.

screen shots

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| Terminal output of new listattr and catattr tools. |

history

|_. version |_. date |_. description |
| v0.2 | 08.10.2003 | Added a tool to rename attributes *rename_attr* and changed some of the messages. |
| v0.1 | 03.10.2003 | First release of *attr_tools*. |