GUI search apps without using a database

Cotton · 2010-09-27 17:52:41

What do people use in the way of GUI based search apps (without a DB backend) to search their disks? Or are there none, and you just run Agent Ransack under wine (which works well BTW)?

Searchmonkey used to be an (excellent) Agent Ransack clone but has recently been rewritten and is considerably less powerful than it used to be. I'd like something with the power of AR but linux based.

drcouzelis · 2010-09-27 18:23:13

As far as I know, there are only three options for doing file searches: create a database, built in filesystem support, and brute force. I don't know of any popular Linux filesystem that has built in instant search support (like Haiku's Be FS), and you are looking for one that doesn't use a database, so does that mean you want one that uses brute force?

Also, are you interested in command line or GUI?

I use updatedb / locate (database type), which are part of the mlocate package. I also sometime use the "find" command. I've never needed anything more.

EDIT: Oops, I see you mentioned that you are looking for "GUI" applications. Sorry.

EDIT: Are you looking for grep functionality too?

Last edited by drcouzelis (2010-09-27 18:27:43)

Cotton · 2010-09-27 19:16:52

I want to be able to filter the searches using file name and file content strings, and date and size criteria.

karol · 2010-09-27 19:19:51

Cotton wrote:

I want to be able to filter the searches using file name and file content strings, and date and size criteria.

Searching for name, size and time / date can be solved with 'find', and 'grep' deals with the contents, but it can read text files, not pdfs, odfs etc.

olvar · 2010-09-27 20:28:00

Is there any reason to exclude db applications? I use recoll and I'm quite happy with it.

Cotton · 2010-09-27 21:38:13

@karol: find & grep are not GUI

@olvar: indexing 1 GB of disk will use a fair amount of disk space that I'd rather not waste.

Agent Ransack allows the user to make very specific searches across large file structures with an easy to use interface and its that functionality I'm searching for. Whilst not having a problem with the command line, its akin to the commands necessary to burn a CD - you can do it via command line, but a GUI makes repeated operations much less time consuming.

karol · 2010-09-27 21:43:42

I know they're not GUI, but you can build your own app if you have too, based on find & grep.
Or use something like http://linuxappfinder.com/package/catfish

[karol@black ~]$ locate -S
Database /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db:
    14346 directories
    133301 files
    7953252 bytes in file names
    3289543 bytes used to store database
[karol@black ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                   10M  144K  9,9M   2% /dev
/dev/disk/by-uuid/bf1d191b-0f0d-4961-bd67-4d023a2e5873
                      7,3G  3,5G  3,5G  50% /
none                  499M     0  499M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1              99M   15M   80M  16% /boot
/dev/sda4              30G   17G   12G  59% /home

If I'm reading that right, my database is 3.2MB and indexes about 20 GB of data (filenames only). If you have many small files, YMMV,

Edit: I think the CLI excels with repeatable, scriptable tasks. Muscle memory works with the kbd too, aliases and functions can abbreviate a long line to a couple keystrokes.

Last edited by karol (2010-09-27 22:00:42)

bernarcher · 2010-09-27 22:07:44

There is the kfind tool in KDE (available in the kdebase-kfind package from extra) which provides this functionality (basically this is a find wrapper GUI).

It can be used outside of a KDE installation depending only on the kdebase-runtime and kdebase-lib packages.

Last edited by bernarcher (2010-09-27 22:12:15)

Cotton · 2010-09-27 23:56:42

karol wrote:

...
If I'm reading that right, my database is 3.2MB and indexes about 20 GB of data (filenames only). If you have many small files, YMMV,
...

It needs to be able to search the contents as well as the filenames.

karol · 2010-09-28 00:03:42

Cotton wrote:

karol wrote:
...
If I'm reading that right, my database is 3.2MB and indexes about 20 GB of data (filenames only). If you have many small files, YMMV,
...
It needs to be able to search the contents as well as the filenames.

That's why I wrote it takes only filenames.

What kind of files do you need to search in? Do you edit those files? Maybe you can compress them and save some space.

It's a time v. space trade-off: database is faster, but takes up some space.

Cotton · 2010-09-28 00:11:10

karol wrote:

...
What kind of files do you need to search in? Do you edit those files? Maybe you can compress them and save some space.
....

Any sort.
No editing required.
Compressing them would make their contents unsearchable.

karol · 2010-09-28 00:19:13

Cotton wrote:

Compressing them would make their contents unsearchable.

I know zgrep and friends are just wrappers, but ...

I don't think there's an app that can search any kind of document. You need one tool for EXIF data, another for pdfs and so on. No silver bullets I'm afraid.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-27 17:52:41

GUI search apps without using a database

#2 2010-09-27 18:23:13

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#3 2010-09-27 19:16:52

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#4 2010-09-27 19:19:51

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#5 2010-09-27 20:28:00

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#6 2010-09-27 21:38:13

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#7 2010-09-27 21:43:42

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#8 2010-09-27 22:07:44

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#9 2010-09-27 23:56:42

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#10 2010-09-28 00:03:42

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#11 2010-09-28 00:11:10

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

#12 2010-09-28 00:19:13

Re: GUI search apps without using a database

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