Disk storage has exploded in the last 40 years. These days, even a terabyte drive is considered small. There is one downside, though. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to find it. Linux provides numerous tools to find files when you can’t remember their name. Each has plusses and minuses, and choosing between them is often difficult.
Definitions
Different tools work differently to find files. There are several ways you might look for a file:
- Find a file if you know its name but not its location.
- Find a file when you know some part of its name.
- Find a file that contains something.
- Find a file with certain attributes (e.g., larger than 100 kB)
You might combine these, too. For example, it is reasonable to query all PDF files created in the last week that are larger than 100 kB.
There are plenty of different types of attributes. Some file systems support tags, too. So, you might have a PERSONAL tag to mark files that apply to you personally. Unfortunately, tool support for tags is somewhat lacking, as you’ll see later.
Another key point is how up-to-date your search results are. If you sift through terabytes of files for each search, that will be slow. If you keep an index, that’s fast, but the index will quickly be out of date. Do you periodically refresh the index? Do you watch the entire file system for changes and then update the index? Different tools do it differently. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?”
