Catfish is a simple graphical interface that works with any search tool you have installed. And if you have multiple search tools installed, you can have your choice of which tool to use for the search. Let’s take a look at this very handy search tool.

Getting and installing

The easiest means of installing Catfish is to open up the Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “catfish” (no quotes), select the results, and click Apply. If you’d rather install via command line you can do so with a command like:

sudo apt-get install catfish

or

yum install catfish

The installation command you use will depend upon the distribution you use.

To start Catfish you will find an entry for it in your desktop menu. For example, in Enlightenment E17 that entry is in Accessories. You can also open the Run command (again depending upon your distribution) issue the command catfish (this can also be done from the command line.)

Figure 1

When Catfish opens you will see what should be a very user-friendly interface broken into two panes (see Figure 1). The left pane is where you enter all of your search options and the right pane is where your search results will appear.

You may also  notice there are no options for Catfish itself. This makes Catfish focus only on the searching so it is as efficient as possible.

To enter a search you need to take into consideration what type of search you want to do. On my particular system I have Beagle, find, and locate installed. So I can choose from any of those three to handle my results. The reason I say to consider which type of search you are doing first is because the type of search will determine the types of options you have available. For instance, if I use find the Fulltext Search option is not available. If I use Beagle I can not use wildcards in my searching.

Because of this, I like to select my search type first. Once I have selected the type I go back and enter the search string and define any options I may want.

Figure 2

Let’s do a Beagle search for the string “ghacks” (no quotes). I will select to add Hidden files as well as Fulltext search.

Once I have everything configured I hit Find and the results will appear in the right pane (see Figure 2). You can click on the results to open a suitable application. For instance, if I click on the ghacks.png result, on my Enligtenment desktop, the file will open in GQview. If I click on one of the folders I get an error because there is no application associated with them. I can, however, right click the folder and choose to copy the folder or save to a file. If I double click on the archive file File Roller will open with the archive.

Final thoughts

If you do much searching on your drive, and you use different tools for different types of searches, you should certainly employ Catfish to make your searching easier.

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After much searching I saw nothing. I even started at the / directory and was coming up with nothing. So naturally I went right to the log files. Believe it or not, it was not in the log files that I discovered where the problem was. Of course I thought I should share this experience with ghacks in order to illustrate how troubleshooting a Linux machine can go.

After the futile manual file search for files I went to the logs. The first log I went to (which is the first log I always turn to) dmesg which prints the message buffer from the kernel. To view this you just type dmesg at the terminal window. This was my first strike as the kernel buffer knew nothing of my capacity drive.

My next step was to head on over to /var/log and take a peek around any of the log files that might offer up a clue as to why my hard drive was maxed out. My instincts always take me to /var/log/messages first. This particular log file keeps track of general system information regarding boot up, networking. Another strike.

At this point I realized I had to take a break and clear some space because the warnings wouldn’t stop. I doubled checked to make sure the reports were correct by issuing the command:

df -h

which confirmed that /dev/sda1 was at 100% usage. I managed to free up a couple of gigs of space by deleting some torrents. The errors went away and I could continue working.

My next step was to check the size of my proxy logs and Dansguardian logs. I had to move both systems over to my main desktop and had a feeling those logs needed to be rotated. I was right, but it didn’t solve my problem. The tiny prox logs weren’t huge (by any stretch of the imagination), but they were many. So I deleted the older logs and moved on.

I was running out of log files to check and nothing had given me any idea what was going on.

Search and destroy

It was time to go back to the search method. But instead of using the manual method (how long would it take to weed through the ENTIRE Linux file system – I didn’t want to know) I opted to employ a little help thanks to the find command. The find command allows you to add switches to your search to indicate file size. In my case I wanted to first see if there were any files larger than 100 MB in size. To do this I will issue the command:

find / -size +1000000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

as either root or using sudo. What this command does is tell find to search for files > 1000MB and send them to the standard output (that’s basically the terminal window), and pipe them to xargs so that you can see the detailed list (using “-l” of ls).  Because I was starting at the root directory, I knew this would take some time.

It did. But after some time I discovered five files that were each 12 gigs in size in /var/cache/. These files were from a backup program I was working with and forgot to disable. So once a week my entire /home directory was being backed up. I deleted the files (recovering sixty gigs of space) and disabled the backup program. Problem solved.

Final thoughts

There are times when even the best logging system available will not tell you what you need to know. At those times you have to employ your best sluething techniques. Fortunately the Linux operating system encourages these types of administration tricks.

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There are a couple of searching tools that immediately come to mind to take care of your searching needs. The first tool is locate and the second is find. I much prefer the former tool because it is much faster. But both tools can do the job. Both tools are run from the command line and can be run as either the root or a standard user. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Locate

The locate command does not actually search through the directory hierarchy. What locate does is search through a database for the files you are looking for.  Because of this the search is faster. But because it uses a database that means the database has to be updated in order for new to show up in results (or deleted files to not show up in results). So before you actually start using this command you will want to update the database. In order to update the database used by locate you need to issue the command updatedb. It might be wise to set up a cron job to have the database updated regularly (as most of us won’t remember to update the database as often as it is necessary.)

Once you have the database updated you are ready to search. The locate command is simple:

locate FILENAME

(Where FILENAME is the actual name of the file you are searching.

Naturally there are switches you can use with the command. The most useful of these are:

(NOTE: Switches will be proceeded by the “-” character.)

• c – Instead of writing the resulting names it writes the number of matches found.
• d – Use a different database than the default.
• i – Ignore case
• r – Use a regular expression.

The last switch should really raise the eyebrows of the hard core at heart. The locate command can use regular expressions which makes this command VERY useful.

Find

Unlike the locate command, find does search through the filesystem hierarchy. Because of this find is much slower than locate. But also because of this, there is no need to update a database. So the find command always will have the most up-to-date results.

The syntax of the find command is very similar to that of locate.

find FILENAME

Where FILENAME is the actual name of the file name to search.

And, like locate (and nearly every Linux command), there are switches to enhance the usability. The most useful of these switches are:

(NOTE: Switches will be proceeded  by the “-” character.)

• L – Follow symbolic links
• delete – Will delete the found files.
• exec ; COMMAND FILENAME- Will execute the COMMAND on the FILENAME.

The find command is actually quite a bit more complex than locate. Because find’s actually purpose is to examine files (the end results can be found files), find does much more. But for command line file searching, it does perform admirably.

Final Thoughts

My preferences is to use locate. I always use locate before I will use a gui search tool. I trust the results, the results are faster, and often more accurate (so long as I have updated the database.) Give either of these tools a try. You will most likely be happy with the results (unless, of course, you can’t find the file you’re trying to locate.)

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