Desktop search tools for Linux

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sunday 24 May 2009 14:55:43 Ehud Karni wrote:
> 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.

A few problems with locate:

1. It doesn't do full-text search, and just searches according to the 
filename. You can perform text search on its results using "xargs grep", 
"xargs ack" or a similar tool, but this is slower than indexing. And if you 
don't know the filename - you'll need to search through a lot of files.

2. It doesn't handle compressed or otherwise encoded filenames properly. It 
isn't content-type sensitive.

----------------------

Beagle and its friends are better in those regards. I should note that I'm not 
using Beagle or whatever, because I didn't really find a need for them, and 
because someone told me he once used a similar program for MS-Windows and as a 
result became disorganised and could not find his files afterwards.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82

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