Using the FATMEN catalogue - a simple example

The FATMEN catalogue can be used as a general purpose catalogue, for example, to store information about the records, cassettes and CDs that someone owns.

To create a catalogue, we just type      

mkfatnew

We can then catalogue our collection by composer, making directories such as BACH, BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN etc.

fm
FM>mkdir BACH
FM>mkdir BEETHOVEN
FM>mkdir CHOPIN

We may well group the music under the type of work, such as CONCERTOS, SONATOS, SYMPHONIES. We then have very readable generic-names, e.g. //MUSIC/CLASSICAL/BEETHOVEN/SYMPHONIES/NUMBER9, could correspond to Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Note that, using the FATMEN shell, we would never need to type the //MUSIC/CLASSICAL as this would be our 'home' directory. We can even return to it by typing cd \$HOME.

We can now type commands such as:

FM>ls beethoven/symphonies/(7:9) | List works 7-9 inclusive
FM>ls b*/c*/*                   | All works by composers
                                  with names beginning B
                                  and categories beginning C.
FM>ls */* -gc | Display the full name and comment field of 
                every entry

We can, of course, use other fields of the catalogue, such as the media type. Here we will use 1 to mean CD, 2 for cassette and 3 for LP. Thus, by default, FATMEN will preferentially find a CD before a cassette before an LP. We could also define the location code, such as

1 : home
2 : car
3 : boat
4 : pad in St. Tropez

Then, we can limit our searching to a subset of the catalogue.

FM>set/location 3
FM>ls */* -gc | Now we just see what we have on our boat

If we get a new DAT player, we may want to add this, say as media type 4. We can then redefine the search order with:

FM>set/media 1,4,2,3 | Access DAT after CD but before everything else

There are also other fields that could be of interest, such as the performance date, for which we could use the creation date field, the performers, e.g. Berlin Philharmonic, and the conducter. We could then use the search command to list all entries performed by the London Sympony Orchestra (for example).

Thus, we can make selections according to

• The generic-name, e.g. BACH_*/*, to list all works by the BACH family.
• The FATMEN keys, such as the location-code, media-type or copy-level (which could be important for convential cassettes!)
• The catalogue entry itself, such as performance date, composer, record company etc.

We will see later how to use the same features to manage physics data, which is of course our main concern.