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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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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This week saw a lot of updates and it was quite hard to pick one that would receive the update of the week award. Since the Open Office update has not been made official yet on their homepage I’m giving the award to Orbit Downloader which is in my opinion the best free downloader out there.

If you know of an application that has been updated but is missing in the list let me know, I will surely do my best to monitor it from now on and add it to the list.

µTorrent 1.8 Build 9137 Beta – a new Beta version of this lightweight Bittorrent client.

7-Zip 4.58 Alpha 5 – another popular archiver with support for many different zip extensions.

aTuner 1.9.82.17453 – a tiny tool that can change several settings of Ati and Nvidia video cards.

BitComet 20080320 Beta – a fast Bittorrent client.

CCleaner 2.06.567 – cleans the computer from temporary and other unnecessary files.

Cobian Backup 9.1.1.166 Beta – an excellent backup software with options to backup to an ftp server.

CodecInstaller 2.9.1 – analyzes multimedia files and displays information about the codecs that are needed to play them.

doPDF 6.0.257 – sets up a virtual printer that creates pdf documents.

DVDFab HD Decrypter 4.1.2.0 – copy DVDs to your hard drive and remove protections – if any – in the process.

FeedDemon 2.6.1.0 Beta – a desktop feed reader.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 3.8.5 – a highly popular codec package.

Locate 3.1.8.3260 Beta – Locate offers one of the fastest ways to search for files and content in files in Windows.

MediaCoder 0.6.1.4077 – a batch transcoder for audio and video files.

MediaMonkey 3.0.3.1147 Beta 3 – music organizer, manager and player.

Nokia PC Suite 6.86 Release 6 – applications to transfer to and backup data from your Nokia mobile phone.

ooVoo 1.5.1.96 Beta – offers multi-user video chat.

Norton Removal Tool 2008.0.3.15 – Some call it the best software Norton ever produced. Use this if you want to completely remove a Norton / Symantec product from your computer.

Open Office 2.4.0 – the final version of Open Office 2.4 after several release candidates. A popular replacement for Microsoft Office.

Orbit Downloader 2.6.4 – a fantastic download manager with many advanced features.

PeaZip 2.0 – an alternative to the more popular packers like Winzip and Winrar.

Recuva 1.12.291 – recover accidentally deleted files on your computer.

Songbird 0.5 RC2 – a multi-platform multimedia player.

SpeedFan 4.34 Beta 44 – manage the speed of the fans in your computer.

SUMo 1.7.0.42 Beta – Sumo scans your computer for known applications and checks their version against an online database to let you know if the computer is having the latest version installed.

Vista Codec Package 4.6.2 – add several missing video and audio codecs to Windows Vista at once.

WildBit Viewer 5.2 Alpha 4.0 – another update of this popular image viewer.

WinSCP 4.1 Beta – I’m almost exclusively using WinSCP to update my websites.

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I did mention Locate before here at Ghacks and thought that this awesome program deserves another article. The software developer is constantly working on Locate and he has added several new functions since the last time that I wrote a review about it. The biggest change in this new version of Locate is the Find as you type function. Locate does not wait anymore until the user presses the submit button to find files or text in files but presents results immediately.

You can still filter results in so many ways that it would take ten articles to explain all the options. It is possible to filter by file size, file date, extension and file path for instance. Normal file searches take about a second before all results are displayed, it takes a bit longer to search for content in files naturally but it is fast as well if you consider that all files on all hard drives can be searched.

I would suggest to schedule daily updates for Locate if you have the intention to use it regularly. You can either configure this option in Locate but the application has to be running to start the file update process on its own or you can use the task scheduler of Windows to update the Locate database regularly.

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It scans your hard drives initially for all files, writes them to a database and offers a basic search form that can be spiced up with advanced search options. The basic search lets you search for filenames, extensions and specific locations on your hard drive. Advanced search parameters let you specify minimum and maximum file sizes, file age and other parameters like searching for files and folders or matching names only.

After the initial scan which takes a few minutes normally all search results are presented in 1-2 seconds. The speed is really incredibly and it is well worth using it. I wish there was a way to replace the Windows search with Locate for Windows.

Locate comes with its own scheduler that can update the file database on a regular basis. Those updates don’t take long because only new files will be added to the database (and old removed). There are so many options available that it would take a book to describe them all.

To sum it up. Locate is the best file search for Windows that I encountered so far. A must have software.

Read More:

Locate for Windows
Locate Introduction (Screencast from Donation Coder)

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