I know about find and
grep -r, but those require operator skill
Probably wishful thinking on my part, but is there something akin
to Apple's SpotLight file finder on RasPiOS? I know about find and
grep -r, but those require operator skill and some patience.
Apt search locates mdfinder.app, but it's part of GNUstep and
I think that's a whole separate GUI by itself.
I've never had much to do with Apple stuff, so I just looked up
"Spotlight MacOS" and it sounds much more like the "locate" command
from GNU findutils, than "grep -r".
Personally I very rarely do whole-system file searches, so I just
use "find -name" in particular directories. But locate should be
much quicker for a system-wide search, you just have to run
"updatedb" regularly.
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
I've never had much to do with Apple stuff, so I just looked up
"Spotlight MacOS" and it sounds much more like the "locate" command
from GNU findutils, than "grep -r".
Personally I very rarely do whole-system file searches, so I just
use "find -name" in particular directories. But locate should be
much quicker for a system-wide search, you just have to run
"updatedb" regularly.
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think locate (and find(1) ) search file *names*, while Spotlight (and grep) search file *contents*. Spotlight knows how to interpret PDF, Word, etc files, not just plain text.
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
I've never had much to do with Apple stuff, so I just looked up
"Spotlight MacOS" and it sounds much more like the "locate" command
from GNU findutils, than "grep -r".
Personally I very rarely do whole-system file searches, so I just
use "find -name" in particular directories. But locate should be
much quicker for a system-wide search, you just have to run
"updatedb" regularly.
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think locate (and find(1) ) search file *names*, while Spotlight (and grep) search file *contents*. Spotlight knows how to interpret PDF, Word, etc files, not just plain text.
For similar searching of contents on Linux, there's an indexing library called xapian and various frontends, eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoll
(I think some desktop environments build this in, not sure about PiOS)
I can't really recommend a frontend, in fact the only reason I know about Xapian is because I saw it eating CPU one day and worked out how to turn it off.
Recursively searches directories for a regex pattern
ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches your current
directory for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore rules and
automatically skip hidden files/directories (smart filtering) and binary files.
ripgrep is similar to other popular search tools like The Silver Searcher, ack
and grep.
.
ripgrep is generally faster than both The Silver Searcher and GNU grep. It
defaults to recursive directory search and won't search files ignored by your
`.gitignore` files. Use ripgrep if you like speed, filtering by default, fewer
bugs, and Unicode support.
.
On the other hand, if you like multiline search, then ripgrep may not quite
meet your needs (yet), and it will never support fancy regex features such as
backreferences or lookaround
.
This package contains the following binaries built from the Rust crate
"ripgrep":
- rg
Simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find
While it does not seek to mirror all of find's powerful functionality,
fd provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for 80% of the use cases.
.
Features:
.
* Convenient syntax: ‘fd PATTERN’ instead of ‘find -iname '*PATTERN*'’.
* Colorized terminal output (similar to ls).
* It's fast, often faster than find.
* Smart case.
* Ignores hidden directories and files, by default.
* Ignores patterns from your .gitignore, by default.
* Regular expressions.
* Unicode-awareness.
* Parallel command execution with a syntax similar to GNU Parallel.
.
Please note: the executable and the associated manpage were renamed
from ‘fd’ to ‘fdfind’ because of a file name clash.
[...] ripgrep:
And fd-find:
Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think locate (and find(1) ) search file *names*, while Spotlight (and grep) search file *contents*. Spotlight knows
how to interpret PDF, Word, etc files, not just plain text.
Ah right, I didn't pick that up from skimming the Wikipedia page,
but in that case it's quite different. It must gemerate a very big
database if it covers file contents as well.
On 11-11-2022 08:10, A. Dumas wrote:
[...] ripgrep:
And fd-find:
I learned about those from https://www.youtube.com/c/MissingSemester
which also had other useful things. Their git lecture was a bit crap; as always too slow at the start and then followed by "eh, this should've
worked *clippety clop* ok I fixed it". And I hate them all jerking off
to vim like they are in a secret society keeping the riff raff out.
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think locate (and find(1) ) search file
*names*, while Spotlight (and grep) search file *contents*. Spotlight knows
how to interpret PDF, Word, etc files, not just plain text.
Ah right, I didn't pick that up from skimming the Wikipedia page,
but in that case it's quite different. It must gemerate a very big
database if it covers file contents as well.
Yes it does. With grep and friends you're doing the processing at the time of search, while with Spotlight and Xapian you're doing it ahead of time so that the search is faster.
The downside of building that database is it takes CPU cycles - which is
fine for some use cases. Personally using laptops they are either in use on battery or sleeping, so there's no time when there are 'free' CPU cycles
that don't waste battery. A Pi is probably less worried about that.
I tried installing xapian-omega, since this is a desktop machine with
lots of unused cpu time. The install seems successful, but I can't make
heads nor tails of how to use it. Bash can't find an executable by that
name, there's no manpage and no obvious additions to the main menu list.
I also installed xapian-tools, which added more software but not obvious
user interface.
Anybody got a hint?
bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:
I tried installing xapian-omega, since this is a desktop machine with
lots of unused cpu time. The install seems successful, but I can't make
heads nor tails of how to use it. Bash can't find an executable by that
name, there's no manpage and no obvious additions to the main menu list.
I also installed xapian-tools, which added more software but not obvious
user interface.
Anybody got a hint?
Just a generic solution:
dpkg -L [package name] | grep /bin
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:
I tried installing xapian-omega, since this is a desktop machine with
lots of unused cpu time. The install seems successful, but I can't make
heads nor tails of how to use it. Bash can't find an executable by that
name, there's no manpage and no obvious additions to the main menu list. >> I also installed xapian-tools, which added more software but not obvious >> user interface.
Anybody got a hint?
Just a generic solution:
dpkg -L [package name] | grep /bin
That gave a hint to the doc files. Looks like xapian is a search
engine intended for websites. Not quite what I was looking for,
but maybe the only game in town. I'll explore further.
sudo apt install recollgui
recoll
and up pops up a dialogue saying 'do I want to index my home directory?'. I
A utility that works about the same as grep but much faster is
ripgrep which is in the RaspiOS repos under that name (so, sudo apt
install ripgrep), or https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
I mentioned Recoll before, and:
sudo apt install recollgui
recoll
and up pops up a dialogue saying 'do I want to index my home directory?'. I
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