Although I didn't follow most of the discussion about the finer points of OpenBeFS, I gather that most people recommend attaching certain attributes to each file (and everyone seems to have different opinions on how that should be done). Wouldn't this involve going through each file on disk and reading its attributes every time someone runs a query? Wouldn't that slow down the process? Most people (including me) use Spotlight as a quick way to launch applications. I have been reading Apple's SearchKit documentation (http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/UserExperience/Conceptual/SearchKitConcepts/searchKit_intro/searchKit_intro.html) and some other articles on information retrieval, and I gathered that a database might be the way to go for blazing fast queries. An inverted index is what I'm thinking of here. /me goes off to read more about information retrieval. -- Ankur Sethi http://uncool.in