Is there a program, or a method to add a comment to a filename? Years ago I used 4dos, and it had such a feature. You could even get it to show the comments in the directory display, and you could search for a file by its comment. I don't remember how they did it, but I think it was a separate file in each directory that kept the comments for that directory.

I guess that depends on the file manager in use, plus the file properties you can set. For instance, you can set a title, or author name, even have a comment of some type and then you may see those as you mouse over something. This is mostly in Windows.

I personally reject this concept especially in collaborative development. We once used file attributes to contain some properties, things like document number, title, revision, and so forth. Someone rejected it before me citing that all these "properties" were within the documents themselves. And the fact that we "set" them was bad or worse because people would copy the file for one document to make another and as a result we had seventeen revision 1 copies of the functional spec.

I smirked, walked away and promptly went to prove that person right or wrong only to find that technically they were incomplete ... we had like 47 copies of the functional spec.

To be clear, what happened was the person who created the functional spec did set document properties, got it all correct. Meanwhile the functional spec was now up to revision 15 or something, but the properties said "1.0" dated many months ago. Further, when people copied the fspec and made like a software API for a subsystem, the "contents" of the file were right, but the "properties" were left alone, thus showing that the document was "revision 1.0 functional spec"

Turns out that the one person who wrote these rules was about the only person who did it correctly.

Some file systems allow metadata like this to be attached to directory entries; most do not. Some GUI's approximate this feature through the use of hidden files and/or registry-like databases.

I'm using mint 17, and have no intention of changing any time soon, so I'm mostly interested in doing this in Mint 17. With a deal of extra work I can do it (sort of) myself through a libreoffice calc file, but I have to type in all of the information by hand. I'm looking for an easier way .

With long filennames, one could include a rather detailed comment in the file name, but that makes for other problems (display, in a file manageer is not the only one).

If you have some ideas how you would manipulate files such as using LibreOffice Calc format then think about where automation could occur and I'll be happy to help either writing a program or a script to accomplish it. For instance, say you know that you can place a first line header on every file to describe the contents and want to automate that, this is something which can be done using either a script or program.

Thank you, rtmistler. That's exactly the sort of approach that I would like to pursue. But I'm just getting started trying to do this, and haven't even figured out what details I need to keep track of. Probably don't want a comment on every file, but it should be as automatic as reasonably possible, and easily "callable" when needed. I' wide open for suggestions about those items, and I'll be giving it some serious thought, and get back to you.

You probably know this, but KDE allows the association of tags, a rating, and comments for files, all of which can be displayed in the file manager (dolphin, for example), and files can be sorted based on these criteria, or searched for. KDE is undergoing development and I don't know how stable this feature may be in the future -- ie will a future evolution of the feature not be backwards compatible with the comments etc that you have laboriously enetered for your files. I believe KDE uses akonadi for management of this feature (but I am a user, not a developer). I've played with it, and it does work (I'm using Debian testing).

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No, I did not know that. I'm using mate in mint 17 64 bit, and have been using gnome and mate for several years. I might give it a try. What do they call this feature? and can I use it with gnome, (or mate)?

In my old Gnome 2 Nautilus, I can right click on a file name and choose the properties option. Then there's a Notes tab where I can type in an entry. Look at Mate's Caja file manager to see if that option's still there.