Desktop search tools for Linux

[Ehud Karni]

On Sun, 24 May 2009 02:01:43 Omer Zak wrote:
>
> What search tool would you recommend for use today?
>
> My tradeoffs:
> - Ability to retrieve all results of a search, rather than say the 100
> most recent ones.
> - Plenty of hard disk space, so it need not be economized.
> - After initial indexing, the daemon (or whatever) for handling new
> material should not load the PC too much.

What's wrong with `locate' (beside it is not being updated during the
day ?). You can wrap it any way you want, it has regular expression
search, and it is fast. I use it both in work (over 3.5M files in 69K
directories) and at home (~900K files) and it works fine.

For example, here is the function I use to search my home media:

lct ()
{
    RSRC=`echo "$@" | tr " " "."`;
    echo "locate -i -b -r '$RSRC'";
    locate -i -b -r "$RSRC" | grep -E "(/media/[msf][oui][vbl])|(/ehud/tmp)"
}

The above can be written without the extended grep:

lct ()
{
    RSRC=`echo "$@" | tr " " "."`;
    echo "locate -i '$RSRC'";
    locate -i --regex "((/media/[msf][oui][vbl])|(/ehud/tmp)).*${RSRC}[^/]*$"
}

Ehud.


--
 @@@@@@ @@@ @@@@@@ @    @   Ehud Karni                       אהוד קרני
     @    @      @  @@  @   Senior System Support   תמיכה במערכות מחשב
     @    @ @    @ @  @@    Mivtach - Simon               מבטח - סימון
     @    @ @    @ @    @   Insurance agencies          סוכנויות לבטוח
  Better Safe Than Sorry    Tel: 03-7966-561 :טל Fax: 03-7966-667 :פקס
   http://www.mvs.co.il             mailto:ehud at unix.mvs.co.il  :דו"אל