Pigeonhol

Rules based files organiser

Pigeonhol is a simple script written in C++, that takes care for you about the organisation of your folders.

This piece of software have been made during my course of paradigms of programing, while studying at the oxford brookes university.

It’s been created to help you doing some basic stuff, like categorizing files in folder regarding their extensions.

Pigeonholing is a term used to describe processes that attempt to classify disparate entities into a small number of categories (usually, mutually exclusive ones).

The expression usually carries connotations of criticism, implying that the classification scheme referred to inadequately reflects the entities being sorted, or that it is based on stereotypes.

Wikipedia.

I’ve tried to make pigeonhol as extensible as I can, so its currently working with a concept of rules.

Plugins

Rules are defined in an XML file, and tell what action have to be called when a set of conditions is met:

<plugins>
    <plugin name="unzip">
        <condition filetype="zip" />
        <action>unzip %file%</action>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

This example will unzip files when a zip file have been found. For now, it is only possible to use the filename to get informations, but the code is easy to change.

Note: this is not finished, and the config parser is not implemented so far. Currently, the sofware looks for .zip files in the “observed” folder, and extract them in “extracted”. It also create a pigeonhole.log file.

Internal structure

Internally pigeonhol use the inotify mechanism, that is a part of the linux kernel, to watch out the different modifications to the folders/files of a specific directory, so it is only linux compliant.

Feedback

This is basically a proof of concept, but I think it can be useful then. If you have any feedback on features you want to add, or about the code, drop me a mail at alexis at notmyidea.org !