OSNews

You just don't get it. If I knew the name of the file I was looking for, I probably wouldn't bother searching for it, because I'd know where it was.

Real men obviously prefer inferior methods of search. Stop trying to justify Linux's relative backwardsness.

I really think he might have been joking! But in your case you'd substitute "*" for <x> and put your search term in <y>. Or use grep -R directly.

CLIs being arcane to use seems pretty standard across OSes to me - out of interest, how does one do the equivalent operation via the Windows command line?

Yeah but do I really want to sit there for 10-15 minutes while grep plows through 200 GB of data? I'll take an indexed system like Spotlight any day over primitive grep. Grep has its uses, and being a system-wide search tool is not one of them. That was my point.

As for Windows, I believe the grep equivalent is "find". Try "find /?" -- it should give you some information.

If only GNOME devs had the manpower, resources, time of Apple and Microsoft devs. I find it amusing that you should compare and you seem to have all the answers, care to contribute?

Can you convince Steve Jobs to to give his OS-X or spotlight code for free to GNOME?, no I didnot think so. You sure know how to compare apples and oranges dont you!

You sure know how to ignore what you're reading! Here, let me explain it to you ...

Original poster: "Indexed searching is for pansies. Real men use grep."
Me: "Grep is primitive. It's not a system-wide search tool. I'll take Spotlight any day."
You: "OMG GNOME devs don't have the resources to develop a Spotlight-work-alike."

Uhh ... ???

Go back to school. You fail English 101.

Where's the need to wait?

Linux is getting search features much like Apple's spotlight, beagle for example has been mentioned on OSNews for a while and the one article with videos showed it reacting to changes to the file system almost in real time (there was a second between the file being changed and it's appearance in the search results).

From what they showed of beagle it looks like it can either already be used from the command line, or at the very least can be used thought an API to write a command line application if you don't want to use graphical tools. The description of this article even mentions that Beagle can be used in this Nautilus search feature through plugins, so I don't see why you would think there'd be a long wait between starting a search and getting results.

Arrrrgh. This is like the 5th time I have to explain it. People, please ... read the thread before replying to messages. One guy suggested that all anyone would ever need is grep. He suggested that grep is as good as any system-wide indexed search tool.

I said it wasn't.

That is all.

PS: Yes, Linux has Beagle ... but Beagle is nowhere near production-ready from what hear. Good effort, though. It'll go somewhere.

sort of like this..

cd
dir "filename.extension" /s

(Ooops, wrong reply to the wrong post.)

Edited 2005-12-08 05:15

Are u implying that noone ever recalls a file name without knowing where the file is located?

I Guess Apple has relative backwardsness as well then. And windows is relatively going backwards with the combo of winfs and search tools.

I dont like to pin u for trolling but this time i dunno. File indexing/search IS indeed very useful, and most of the big OSes are realizing that.

I never said it wasn't useful ... I use Spotlight all the time.

What I said was that "grep" was a cheap and inferior "alternative" to real indexed searching. The parent poster suggested grep was good enough, when clearly it is not.

What I said was that "grep" was a cheap and inferior "alternative" to real indexed searching

Try to be less trollish with your comment. "grep" is surely not cheap, and not inferior to real indexed searching. You are comparing apples and oranges. grep is not an indexed searching tool.
Stop using stupid words like "cheap" about a program that can do far more powerful things than indexed searching.
That's actually indexed searching that is an alternative to grep, given that you can do what indexed searching does using grep with other tools (find, locate, ...).

Okay, let me get this straight ... are you trying to tell me that grep/find/locate are equally-superior tools to a real indexed search system?

Seriously?

Let's compare --

Indexed Searching: Results within seconds, contextual results, results in many forms with much information

Grep searching: Results take 1-30 minutes depending on amount of data, results in the form of just relevant lines of text from a file

You've got to be kidding me. :-| Again I'll repeat it: Grep wasn't designed to be a system-wide search tool, and it performs badly as one. Don't be fitting a square peg into a round hole.

Good lord, what a humourless bunch we have in here today. I'd just like to draw the attention of "Linux is Poo" and all the other anonymous posters to the fact that no-one thinks find/locate and grep are suitable replacements for a full desktop-search implementation. It was just a typical computing joke. If you've ever looked at it on Slashdot you'll see the typical format

Story: New app X is launched

Comment
X sucks, real men use [insert ridiculous archaism here].

And then people either laugh, add to the joke, or expand on the [ridiculous archaism] to provide some extra information. After all, as I said elsewhere, when you're working on remote machines, the commandline may be all you have to work with it, and then such ostensibly ridiculous archaisms can actually come in handy.

Seriously lads, switch to de-caff and grow up: this is exactly the sort of nonsense that gives OSNews posters a bad name.

What's so special about names anyway? I'm can much easily remember how things looks and how the context looks so I can find it later. Names, I'm not so good with.

It usually takes me a year or two to learn the neames of all my class mates/colleagues, but only about a day or two to learn to find my way around the school/work place.

So I think a way to quickly navigate a stable space would be more welcome than a search for names...

You just don't get it. If I knew the name of the file I was looking for, I probably wouldn't bother searching for it, because I'd know where it was.

Real men obviously prefer inferior methods of search. Stop trying to justify Linux's relative backwardsness.

Jeez if you knew anything about the commandline you would notice that you can put wildcards after the iname option if you remember _part_ of the filename or * to search all files (it's also case insensitive) and the grep command will look in the file for a search string (or regular expression).
So he's searching the file content as much as on filename !

Of course he forgot the '' to escape the ; and I would also use the -l option with the grep to print ony the names of matching files.

And that's supposed to be just as good as Beagle/Spotlight/WinFS/etc?

Yeah, I'll grep through my data when I have nothing better to do.

And that's supposed to be just as good as Beagle/Spotlight/WinFS/etc?

Nothing beats Spotlight! But it has it's use, especially because you can build complex regexp's and you can do all kinds of cool stuff with those if you know how.

Yeah, I'll grep through my data when I have nothing better to do.

I only grep through other people's data, it's much more fun ;-)

I grep through other people's source code looking for naughty words. :-)

RE: find /path -iname <x> -exec grep <y>{};
Real men do not need anything more.
period.

Oh how I love that Holier Than Thou-attitude. That's the spirit! That's exactly what's going to make people switch from the fiery pits of Windows-hell they're in today to a nice, free desktop OS.

Or
find /path | xargs grep -i <query>

Xargs is faster than -exec!
http://sunportal.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2005-March/006...

or

find /path -iname <x> -exec grep -i <y> {} +

If the users drive you away from a platform, you've got bigger problems than productivity. I mean, if the user community is what's keeping me on Windows, I must be a masochist.

Actually, I'd say real men use: locate <x> | grep path | grep <y> {};

It's amazing that no-one ever thought to simply extend locate and updatedb, it's a fantastic little tool.

It's amazing that no-one ever thought to simply extend locate and updatedb, it's a fantastic little tool.

There is a KDE IO slave for locate, see http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=17201

And yes, it's great for what it does.

stop post stupid alternatives
Desktop Search is not intended to file names
with Beagle backend you can search inside different
file types
pdf html doc oo c c++ python mp3 ogg vorbis txt xml
jpeg png and many others hence nautilus-search is much more powered than esoteric shell commands like grep.

With respect, Mr. Angry Anonymous Person:

1) All the examples above have searched filenames, paths and contents, not just filenames.

2) The original poster was making a joke

3) Myself and some other expanded on that joke a little, providing a bit of information about the Unix commandline that some people might find useful

4) If you're working on a remote server, and it's not possible to start an X or VNC session, find, locate, and grep are all you have to work with, making this snippet of commandline knowledge beneficial.


Mainly however, I just can't figure out why you're so angry...

who cares of redhat
now thanks to Alexander Ubuntu OpenSuse and others can implement nautilus-search without any problems
and btw beagle 0.13 really rocks

who cares of redhat

Funny you say that, but
FYI, Alexader Larsson is Redhat employee

As far as i read, this is *pluggable* search - you can plug any backend as you want. It is clearly win-win situation for all, including Beagle guys.

>As far as i read, this is *pluggable* search - you can plug any backend as you want.

Then a ferret plug-in might be of interest to all those that don't want Mono on their system. It is a free translation (not port or straight rewrite) of Lucene in Ruby.

As far as i read, this is *pluggable* search - you can plug any backend as you want. It is clearly win-win situation for all, including Beagle guys.

See:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fTracker

Edited 2005-12-08 13:50

No source/binary is available at the moment as it is under heavy developemnt.

Um sweet

As the guy writing tracker, I have released a pre-release version of Tracker to interested parties.

Tracker can already do beagle like searches plus it can also do RDF Query searches on any metadata field.

Im hoping to have it as the default search engine for Nautilus search as its written in C and also has very low memory requirements (typically 3-6MB RAM used).

I expect to have it in Gnome VFS shortly...

As far as i read, this is *pluggable* search - you can plug any backend as you want. It is clearly win-win situation for all, including Beagle guys.

The question is - particularly since Larsson is a Red Hat employee - what backend will we see in RHEL and Fedora? One hopes something cool is in the works.

"Yeah, this is nice to see. Redhat is anyones guess. This is a plugin so they certainly don't have to implement it, however, they lose if they don't. "

This is being written by Red Hat. So...

"Has any body tried Ctrl + F on Nautilus. It gives a nice Firefox like search box...But can not use it...I'm using Ubuntu..."

This feature is broken for me as well, Nautilus 2.12.1 on Gentoo.

This is certainly a good approach for searching in Nautilus, although there are many needed UI changes. For example, the saved searches should show up with a folder-looking icon, perhaps a blue version of the standard folder or a folder with a "V" on it.

This looks very promising, though. I hope Red Hat plans on implemented something better than Beagle, because most users won't settle for inferior searching just to avoid using Mono.

"rather than relying solely on out-of-date static indexes."

That isn't entirely true, as there is rlocate, which while it does need database updating, it is up to date when searching.

Interesting progress, even though I doubt I'll use it because I've never found Nautilus that functional. It'd be nice if all the file managers in *nix could work together on such a feature.

FYI, mlocate replaces slocate in Fedora Rawhide.

Actually I agree - I'd much prefer to use Kat (KDE-based) or Beagle (Gnome-based) on my filesystem than grepping through documents etc.

Errr... That's because you're waiting for packages for your distro right ?
When I said apples and oranges, I mean that with grep, you need only, uh, grep to find informations.
With tools like Beagle, and I'm sure like kat too, each specialised app need helpers to pass informations to beagle or kat : you don't just install Beagle or Kat, you also have to modify every app that understand some specific file format for it to send the content correctly formatted.
I mean, Beagle and Kat are far more invasive than grep.
If all goes well, every useful app will have hooks for Beagle and Kat.
In fact, unless both Beagle and Kat use the same connectors, I have doubt that all apps will be able to send info to both. Which will force you even more to use apps from your environment (Evolution for Gnome instead of KMail for example).

But we don't need another frontend to search, we need integration (into the file manager) plus the features of a separate frontend in one place. Separate programs only slow down the flow of operation in an operating system environment. Just my 2 cents.

Because Microsoft never copied anyone... right...

Ofcourse they copy Apple's MAC OS X but this doesn't mean that other software communities start copying them only bcoz they copy others. Apple is really a leader in OS development. They put new concepts in their OS which no other had ever introduced.