Prepopulate DB with static list

[pcomans]

I have a static list of customer files which I would like to initialize the database with. These entries should be able to age but should never be dropped. Is this possible in z?

[Rowno]

I would find this useful too. My case is I often work from a VM shared file system which doesn't exist when the VM is turned off, causing z to drop the paths.

[dbkaplun]

👍

[rupa]

This seems like a couple issues that are related.

I want to avoid adding "prepopulation" code to z if I can - I swore there was an old issue where we described a couple ways of programatically driving z to get things populated - I can't find it, but I'm hoping something like that might work for the "static list of customer files" scenario.

As far as not dropping paths for e.g. network drives, I've pushed a branch no_prunes that respects the $_Z_NO_PRUNE variable. When that's set, entries will age as usual, and be dropped for disuse, but will not be dropped if the directory doesn't exist.

Please try it out, if it works well, I'll merge it to master.

My hope is maybe having this going will make it less important to prepopulate things, since network shares would behave as expected.

[haakenlid]

the .z database is just a text file.You could write a simple script using bash/python/perl that adds your default folders if they are missing and source that script in .bashrc

[iandunn]

I'd also love to see a solution to this problem. Even after a few weeks of usage, I'm sure I'll still regularly run into situations where I have to manually cd to a folder with a long path. Manually adding them all would be very tedious.

Multiply that by all the local and remote systems I regularly work with. And that work could also get wiped out because of #198, or just moving to a new device.

I think @rupa may have been referring to #48 (comment) as a way to prime the datafile:

# add all subdirs of current directory to index, with rank 5
for x in {1..5}; do 
    find "." -type d -exec z --add \'\{\}\' \; 
done

That gives me find: z: No such file or directory errors on OSX, but I haven't dug into why. find should probably -prune commonly unwanted folders, like .git, node_modules, .sass-cache, etc.

[iandunn]

Made some progress; no errors, but nothing gets added to the datafile either.

find "$(pwd)" -type d -exec /usr/local/Cellar/z/1.9/etc/profile.d/z.sh --add \'{}\' \;

• Use pwd to get absolute paths
• Use full path to z.sh because find isn't aware of the z function
• chmod +x z.sh if you haven't already

Still needs to exclude things like .git