Adding & Viewing files¶

Now let’s add some files to brig. We do this by using brig stage. It’s called stage because all files first get added to a staging area. If you want, and are able to remember that easier, you can also use brig add.

$ echo "Hello World" > /tmp/hello.world
$ brig stage /tmp/hello.world
$ brig cat hello.world
Hello World
$ brig ls
SIZE   MODTIME                       PATH          PIN
986 B  Mon Mar  4 23:04:07 CET 2019  /README.md     ✔
12 B   Mon Mar  4 23:04:23 CET 2019  /hello.world   ✔

This adds the content of /tmp/hello.world to a new file in brig called /hello.world. The name was automatically chosen from looking at the base name of the added file. All files in brig have their own name, possibly differing from the content of the file they originally came from. Of course, you can also add whole directories.

If you want to use a different name, you can simply pass the new name as second argument to stage:

$ brig stage /tmp/hello.world /hallo.welt

You also previously saw brig cat which can be used to get the content of a file again. brig ls in contrast shows you a list of currently existing files, including their size, last modification time, path and pin state [1].

One useful feature of brig cat is that you can output directories as well. When specifying a directory as path, a .tar archive is being outputted. You can use that easily to store whole directories on your disk or archive in order to send it to some client for example:

# Create a tar from root and unpack it to the current directory.
$ brig cat | tar xfv -
# Create .tar.gz out of of the /photos directory.
$ brig cat photos | gzip -f > photos.tar.gz

Coreutils¶

You probably already noticed that a lot of commands you’d type in a terminal on a normal day have a sibling as brig command. Here is a short overview of the available commands:

$ brig mkdir photos
$ brig touch photos/me.png
$ brig tree
• ✔
├── hello.world ✔
├── photos/ ✔
│  └── me.png ✔
└── README.md ✔

2 directories, 2 files
$ brig cp photos/me.png photos/moi.png
$ brig mv photos/me.png photos/ich.png
# NOTE: There is no "-r" switch. Directories are always deleted recursively.
$ brig rm photos

Please refer to brig help <command> for more information about those. They work in most cases like their pendant. Also note that there is no brig cd currently. All paths must be absolute.

Hints - Configuring encryption & compression¶

Often times you might want not encrypt all files. A typical use case would be to have a /public folder where you put in files to share with your friends. Probably there are some freely available files in there, you got from some corners of the internet (for example your excellent meme collection). Those files don’t need encryption and probably not even compression. If you want to exclude the /public folder from both you can give brig a hint:

# let's assume /public exists already:
$ brig hints set /public --compression none --encryption none
$ brig hints
PATH     ENCRYPTION  COMPRESSION
/        aes256gcm   guess
/public  none        none

As you might notice, there is already one hint set by default for the root directory. If you want to change the global defaults, you can simply modify this one. Below you see the hint you just created. This however does not change any existing files. It just tells brig »next time you modify those files, please use those algorithms«. If you want to make sure the files are changed to use the algorithm you set, then you can use the stage --recode command:

$ brig stage --recode /public

If you do this, you can observe a small change when looking at the IsRaw attribute of the file’s info:

# This was 'true' before the recode.
$ brig info --format '{{ .IsRaw }}' /public/cat-meme.png
false

The IsRaw attribute tells you if you could download this file by its hash from an IPFS gateway. If its true, brig does not touch it at all. This is an useful attribute you want to share a file with your non-tech friends who prefer to click on a regular HTTP URL: You can just point them a [IPFS gateway](https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipfs-gateway).