Semantic File Search

A native, system-wide semantic file indexer written in C.

Recursively scan a specified directory, calculate file hashes, and store file descriptions in SQLite.

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• Recursive directory crawling
• SHA-256 file hashing
• SQLite metadata and description storage
• Change detection using hash + mtime + size
• Basic file type inference from extension

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Build

Dependencies

• sqlite3
• openssl

macOS (with Homebrew)

brew install sqlite3 openssl
gcc tracker.c -o indexer \
  -I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include \
  -L$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib \
  -lsqlite3 -lssl -lcrypto \
  -Wall -Wextra -Wno-deprecated-declarations

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt install build-essential libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev
gcc tracker.c -o indexer \
  -lsqlite3 -lssl -lcrypto \
  -Wall -Wextra

Usage

./indexer <database_path> <directory_to_scan> [max_depth]

Example

./indexer myindex.db ~/Desktop/test_scan 1

Planned Features

• AI-based description generation (CLIP, LLMs)
• File format-aware parsing (PDF, DOCX, code, etc)
• CLI search frontend (possibly in Rust or C)
• Live file system change tracking (libgit2 or inotify/FSEvents)
• Ignore rules (.searchignore)
• Fuzzy text search via ripgrep