Matthew Saltzman wrote:
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:30 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
But then you can use "find". I use it all the time with hundreds
(thousands?) of files in multiple directories with even more sub
directories.
find only searches the file names - These desktop search tools do much
more than this - They search *inside* the files. They know how read most
of the common file formats (including images, searching the EXIM
comments and music files) and will match your search to any file which
matches.
But then, he'll say, he uses grep.
How true. :) You must be a mind reader.
No use of find, or careful organisation of your file system can do this.
The other disadvantages of command-line tools are:
- They can't re-use information learned in one scan to make another scan
more efficient. Indexers index once (and incrementally after) and the
searches run against the indexed data--typically much faster.
- The traditional tools don't understand specialized files. It doesn't
help much to know that your fedora-list mbox matches a phrase without
knowing which message it is, if you have a few hundred messages.
On the other hand, indexers:
- Use resources in the background, possibly at inconvenient times.
- Take up (possibly significant) disk space with indices.
- Index only what they recognize.
So each method has its good and bad points.
Chris
One issue with all this pre-compiled database is it makes things easy
for someone else to trace your actions. Maybe I am paranoid but I found
that even "locate" can reveal to much information that I don't want
easily found.
But this is my preference.
I want to start encrypting everything on the laptop and many files on
the desktop.
--
Robin Laing
