[Pythonmac-SIG] Spotlight Importing without .py

[Nicholas Matsakis]

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/pythonmetadataimporter.html

I really dig the Spotlight Metadata Importer for python, but it only works 
for files ending in ".py" which excludes various shell scripts I have 
written that have no filename extension.  Anyone have a super elegant 
solution to this problem?

Here's my thoughts on the matter.  To my knowledge, Mac OS X has only 
three ways of knowing the type of a file: the HFS type code, the filename 
extension, and the presence of an executable bit on a file* (in order of 
precidence). I've already nixed filename extensions and the executable bit 
only seems to be able to identify something as a "Unix Executable File". 
So, that leaves HFS type codes. The first question is whether this is an 
HFS type code lying around from the days of yore that identified a python 
executable script?  If not, would anyone mind if I registered one? (Once 
we've got a suitable type code, modifying the Spotlight Metadata Importer 
to claim it is no big deal).

The more challenging part is to actually affix that type code on all 
extension-less python executables; As far as Mac OS X is concerned these 
files have no type, so there isn't a trivial way to write a script that 
would search for them and tag them.  Using spotlight, you can at least 
limit your search to text and executable files, but you would still need 
to example their contents individually to know whether they should be 
tagged.  This script would have to be run periodically or, if you put all 
such scripts in a common location you could create a launch item for it.

As a crazy alternative to all of the above, the python metadata importer 
could be written to work in conjunction with spotmeta 
(http://www.fluffy.co.uk/spotmeta/) to additionally run on all text or 
executable files and only add the python metadata if the file actually is 
a python file.  Not that I'm suggesting this be done or anything, but I 
think its an interesting idea.  Hopefully Leopard will provide a more 
elegant solution to this problem.

Nick Matsakis

* The saddest part of this story is that /usr/bin/file has been on Mac OS 
X since day one and understands perfectly well what a "a python script 
text executable" is.  Yet, when the Finder encounters a file without an 
extension or HFS code rather than, say, looking at the file to see what 
kind it is, it absolves all responsibility and forces you to find an 
application that might open it.