Clustering Files with Extended File Attributes in Metadata

Classification and searching play an important role in modern file systems and file clustering is an effective approach to do this. This paper presents a new labeling system by making use of the Extended File Attributes [1] of file system, and a simple file clustering algorithm based on this labeling system is also introduced. By regarding attributes and attribute-value pairs as labels of files, features of a file can be represented as binary vectors of labels. And some well-known binary vector dissimilarity measures can be performed on this binary vector space, so clustering based on these measures can be done also. This approach is evaluated with several real-life datasets, and results indicate that precise clustering of files is achieved at an acceptable cost.