Design

Features:

• long running jobs: report progress to user, continue where left off after interruption (checkpoint/restart) and provide common method to halt job
• invoke standard linux tools where possible, e.g., grep
• parallel techniques: master/worker, distributed queue, distributed task graph
• define common file formats for input / output between tools

Components:

• posix i/o wrappers to retry on non-fatal errors (e.g., EINTR)
• component to manipulate paths (e.g., basename, dirname, transform /a/b/../c// into /a/c)
• abstraction for file meta data (stat data) to access fields and transfer between procs
• API to read / write file meta data structures to files
• API to filter and sort file meta data structures
• parallel directory walk
• parallel pipe from one tool to another

Tools:

• list
• find
• copy
• remove
• tar/zip
• grep
• compare