[gentoo-user] File system meta-data indexer / checker

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

Hello all!

    While struggling with managing various old backups --- just
imagine 10 or so copies of almost the same content, some with `rsync`,
some with `rdiff-backup`, yet some others on plain ISO's, all over a
range of a few years --- I stumbled upon the following missing piece
in the Linux tools ecosystem:  a file-system crawler that records
**only** meta-data, like all the info available through `stat`, plus
an assortment of hashes of the files (at least MD5 and SHA-1,2
family), and optionally ACL's and extended attributes.  Thus I was
wondering if someone knows a tool that fits this description.


    I must say I've tried to do my homework, and below are a few tools
that come close, but not quite...

    (A) `rdup` is probably the closest to what I'm searching.  However
there are a few issues:
    * it's output format is not very parsable, especially in cases
like symlinks, and a few other special cases;
    * it doesn't escape the file names --- and from some reason I have
files containing escape sequences in them...
    * it records only SHA-1;
    * it doesn't handle ACL's or extended attributes;

    (B) `mtree` from FreeBSD.  I found two ports of it for Linux,
however my main concern is how parsable is the output...

    (C) `md5deep` (or `sha*deep`), which only records the checksum not
other meta-data.


    Thus, are there any other alternatives?  (Just to be clear, I
don't need a "backup" solution, just something to record file-system
meta-data.  Maybe a "meta-backup" solution... :) )

    Ciprian.