Re: Custom icons from script

[Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>]

Am Samstag, den 16.06.2007, 01:58 -0400 schrieb Andrew Joyce:
> Can someone please advise me as to how I can automate setting custom 
> icons for a series of folders?  I would like to do this from a 
> shell/python/perl/etc script.  I have about 200 folders all with images 
> in them named as "Folder Name.jpg".  I have tried to explore Bonobo as 
> it appears this is how Nautilus manages the metadata, but I am having 
> trouble finding documentation on Bonobo, as well as an API reference for 
> the methods I need to use once I actually make contact with the Bonobo 
> control.  I am hoping someone here can help me get started on the 
> correct path because I feel utterly lost at the moment.

As of today, no public interface is available for modifying metadata.

I suggest to shut down Nautilus, and use libxml and your favorite
scripting language with libxml bindings to modify ~/.nautilus/metadata
directly [don't forget to backup!].

For all "confirmed" folders (i.e. URIs where Nautilus already saw
folders), ~/.nautilus/metadata stores an ASCII-encoded URI. Each of
these files will contain metadata for the files stored in the respective
folder.

So for modifying the metadata for /foo/bar, you'll have to look in
~/.nautilus/metadata/file%2F%2F%2Ffoo.xml . It will contain a toplevel
<directory> entry, which contains <file> entries. For each of the
folders, you'll have to set the custom_icon attribute to the unencoded
image target URI - if the node doesn't exist yet, you'll have to create
it of course.


It's really unfortunate that you have to go through so much hazzle, a
proper metadata storing system that is independent of the file browser,
and uses both extended attributes where available and a fallback
database where it is not available would be way more cleaner and save us
broken XDG specs [1].


[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2007-May/008324.html

-- 
Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>