SoupFS is a unique, tag-based file system designed to organize files in a non-hierarchical way.

By treating directories as tags, we can enter directories to apply filters to our collection of files. Moving files into a directory is analogous to applying said tag, and the order in which directories are entered is meaningless.

This makes SoupFS particularly well-suited for managing large collections of media files, such as images and memes.

To get started with SoupFS, install soupfs through your package manager, or build it yourself through the installation steps below.

To use soupfs, you will need a block device to act as your partition, on which you can make a soup filesystem. If you don't want to reformat your partition, we suggest using a loop device stored as a regular file elsewhere. To do this, do something the following, as the superuser:

soupfs_img=/path/to/your/media_file.img
dd if=/dev/zero of="${soupfs_img}" bs=1M count=1024
losetup -fP "${soupfs_img}"

This will create a file, ${soupfs_img} of 1G (1M * 1024). The block sized used here does not affect the filesystem, only the speed at which you can create the file. Afterwards, you will tell your system to create a loop device pointing to this file. You will need to do this on each reboot, so you might want to put it in your fstab.

To build the filesystem, simply run make. If you additionally want to create the shell interface (which is currently necessary, since we are not able to mount the filesystem, yet), run make shell, which is included in the all target, too.

make all
make install

Build files appear under the build/ subdirectory. The target/ subdirectory will include everything you need to copy onto your prefixed system path (PREFIX=/usr by default), which is what the install target does (and thus you need to run it as root).

Feel free to make pull requests, or report issues if you encounter them! Please start by checking out the contributing guidelines for details.