My Daily Rant

English Open Chat
1

Am I alone in considering that the ‘find files/folders’ “tool” in openSuse 11.1/kde 3.5.1 is the utterest and most useless pile of unwashed pants? I know that the home-brew brigade will tell me to spend a couple of months intensively studying ‘find’ and do it all from a CLI, but hey, I am nearly normal and have other things to do in my life. I hate to mention the great anti-christ devil lurking in a cave in Redmond, but in XP I hit start>search>all files> and enter a fragment or a few letters of the filename, drop down a menu and tell it which drive I wish to be searched and within about 10 seconds have a list of matches. With the suse effort, it can take minutes, often getting no results at all… even when I know 100% that a file matching the criteria exists. Is there any plan for a useable search in 11.2?
(I have written this twice while my HDD churns away searching, and not finding… at least three minutes so far… HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY TAKE SO LONG!!! I have only two small HDD’s)
Why is there not a drop down list of drives or locations so I can narrow the search and exclude places where I don’t wish to look? How do I do that? Do I have to learn some arcane coding to tell the ****ed thing NOT to look in my Windows install?
Are there any GUI alternatives that actually work?
This seems to me to be the very antithesis of what computers are for, simple repetitive tasks> job for machine, instead here I am quicker doing the search manually, or writing down on a scrap of paper where I might have put something.
Update: It has now finished uselessly thrashing away… result=nada zilch.
So I try again, this time with “use index” unchecked (I am guessing this is the GUI difference between ‘find’ & ‘locate’ (??)

Whilst watching my life drain away, I open another instance, and click ‘help’,
Having never found a help button to be all that useful in openSuse, before I read the “kfind” pages I notice there is a button to “Build search Index” @ bottom left, so I think ok, and click it. A list of topics shows up, all checked and all showing status = missing, So I click ‘build index’; some businesslike activity takes place, and a message ‘Index Creation Complete’, with no warnings or caveats and I assume I have now a index of help topics, but… clicking on ‘details’ I see a great long list of entries like this:

INDEXDIR: /home/stephen/.kde/share/apps/khelpcenter/index/
Creating index for 'book_opensuse_referenceen'
htdig failed
INDEXDIR: /home/stephen/.kde/share/apps/khelpcenter/index/
Creating index for 'book_opensuse_referenceen'
htdig failed
INDEXDIR: /home/stephen/.kde/share/apps/khelpcenter/index/
Creating index for 'book_appsen'
htdig failed
INDEXDIR: /home/stephen/.kde/share/apps/khelpcenter/index/
Creating index for 'book_appsen'
htdig failed
INDEXDIR: /home/stephen/.kde/share/apps/khelpcenter/index/
Creating index for 'book_opensuse_securityen'
htdig failed

Brilliant innit? Is there a “help” file for “help”?

Anyway, back to reading the help file. The first page has a bug. A teeensy weensy , tiny bug, but still sloppy…
(try it, title page, press ‘next’ @ bottom right… notice? the link is above the text!! compare it with the other link @ top right)

So on to page 3 or whatever ‘Contents’(… another small sloppy bug; selected text cannot be copied to clipboard using mouse, instead I have to select with mouse, drop edit menu and copy from there)

The following gem-like beauty of helpfulness:

Containing text
Type in the word or phrase the files you are searching for must contain. Note: If you do this in a large folder or checked Include subfolders
in the Name/Location tab, this may take a long time.
(my italics and my comment “you ain’t kidding there matey”)
Note
This option will not work for all files listed under File type. Only the following file types are supported:
Text files, e.g. source code and README files
KWord >= 1.2
KPresenter >= 1.2
KSpread >= 1.2
OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Impress
OpenOffice.org Calc
(I don’t use any of these apart from text files)
…

Well why the flying ********* are they listed in the drop down if they don’t work? Why do we have to go to help to find this out??

(BTW, I have not been using this “feature”, I only usually need to search for filenames or fragments thereof, It still takes forever… Why?)

…and that is it basically, no actual “help” there at all. This really is a train wreck of an “Tool/app/feature” How on earth did it get to be a standard part of the distro?

Oh well just another day in openSuse paradise I suppose. (how much $$ is Win 7 again??)

2

So… so incensed was I by this hopeless pile of ordure, and wondering whether I was not, in fact looking throught the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia with my memories of XP, I did a test. First using Kwin to find filenames matching ‘compiz-switch’
Result 6m 45s to search a 120Gb drive, using an average of 85% of CPU whilst doing so.
I fired up the beast from Redmond.
I had forgotten that “search” is also available with a right click on “My Computer”, or from “explorer” or right click on any folder or drive on dektop, or in a window.
Results:
I struggled to set it a search which took more than 2 seconds, I tried “clare” & “johnscvms”… < 2secs for both.
Thinking this may be an unfair test, and that Windows might “sneakily” (What! how dare it use logic???) search ‘My Documents’ first, I tried a few odd patterns matching files more deeply nested and hidden away… again < 2 secs for each.
I then set it to look for a file which did not exist… To search the whole 300Gb drive?
9 seconds.
I have indexing switched off on WinXP, and Beagle is banished from openSuse. Can anyone explain or defend this useless piece of garbage? Is it just me?
I am so annoyed that I might email the folks on the “credits” list of the help file with a link to this post. If I was on such a list I would urgently lobby to have my name taken off, the shame of being publically associated with this would be too much to bear, I would not be able to go out without a disguise, in case people started pointing at me in the street.

3

Update…
I tried kfind with the non-existent filename pattern…
Result: It took too long for me to add this as an edit…rotfl!rotfl!rotfl!rotfl!

TWELVE MINUTES AND TWENTY-NINE SECONDS!!!

Can anyone explain or defend this useless piece of garbage?

4

Unwashed pants belong in the soapbox. :stuck_out_tongue:

They are planning to do some GUI side stuff on this.

KDE’s future… - openSUSE Forums

In the interim, I’ve had no problems just opening up a terminal and doing a


find / -name '[name]' 2>/dev/null

So to only search home, for example, just put ‘find /home’. Doesn’t take too long…

5
  1. Ooops sorry , mods feel free to move to soapbox as you see fit…
  2. Thank-you for the reply and the helpful tip!

… and a search from / for a non existant file takes 12 secs… not bad!

but: What is the 2>dev/null bit all about??

6

i think you might be happy with locate…i certainly am…

it builds a data base (which yes, takes a few minutes…maybe many
minutes, the FIRST time)…

but, once that is done it is blazing!
really…

for one small example, i just did
locate rp*
and received 18 lines in a second, maybe two…

use YaST to install ‘locate’ and it will setup so a cron will run a
daily db update, in background (with less sucking of cycles than beagle)…

if you wanna try it immediately after install, you have to first
build/populate the database, i think that just takes:

updatedb
(probably as root, otherwise the db won’t include stuff outside your home)

you should check man locate after initial install…

a down side is if you install a NewProgram, and then wanna see where
stuff went you, you can’t run

locate NewProgr*

to find stuff until after you run
updatedb
(so, have some tea with a spoonful of patience)

i’m pretty sure you will like the speed…a lot!

–
palladium
Have a lot of fun…

7

Cheers Palladium, I am aware of locate, and have it installed, the post was just a rant about this particular rubbishy front-end.

8

there is a very effective solution for you if you miss the file-indexing that windows does by default.

install findutils-locate which will index all the files on your machine AND a KDE rpm called kio-locate.

the findutils-locate will create a cron job to build a database file index every day (/var/lib/locate.db-iirc) and the kio-locate makes querying this database transparent from any kde3 dialog box… by using the prefix locate:<file>

sadly, this kde utility has not been ported to kde4 (i have attempted to bribe the author), works with kde3 apps on kde4 thou.

i believe there is also a other graphical frontends for findutils-locate, qlocate comes to mind.

hope this helps…

9

Thank you SO much J Xavier, I will look into those tools ASAP!

10

It isn’t strictly necessary - my understanding is that it just redirects a certain level of error messages to the null device, so you aren’t flooded with ‘permission denied’ messages and other useless cruft.

You can also equally well redirect the output to a file for later perusal. http://www.codecoffee.com/tipsforlinux/articles/21.html

Some good info in ‘man find’ (nothing about that specifically it seems…), the ‘maxdepth’ argument being particularly handy.

11

A ha! I ran it as a su -c command to get round the perm denied stuff… TY for the tips!

12

Excuse me for just a minute. We have been seeing lots of rants lately, and from the first post of this thread, I was affraid that’s all this was going to be. I am so glad that this was not one of those threads. This turned into a perfect example of venting ones dissapointment and frustration, and yet being open to help and other solutions.

Nicely done.

13

lol, I like the “pile of unwashed pants” bit, made me laugh for a few minutes :D.

And thanks for the > dev/null bit confuseling, that’s a great addition to my find line :slight_smile:

14

@Jonathan_R: Be fair to him though. He did have a good little rant going for the first three posts. :slight_smile:

@growbag: No worries - I just lifted it from the link I provided. I might even try to work it into a bash alias… Does anyone know how to work with arguments in aliases?

ETA:

Ah - I’ve found this from a sample .bashrc. Don’t understand it though…

function ff() { find . -type f -iname ‘’$’*’ -ls ; }

15

Yes he did. Rants are ok though. We all get frustrated, and need an outlet. It’s the fact that he was open to ideas and support that made the difference. Find Files/Folders works perfectly for me on openSUSE 11.2.

16

TY all for the kinds words and tolerance. An especial TY to confuseling for this link:

Tips For Linux - How to find files in Linux using ‘find’

Lovely stuff; clear, with examples, and explanations…

17

It’s a useful page, no doubt. Glad to be of service.

But keep the rants coming - that was funny. :slight_smile:

18

wow, that one is fantastic :smiley:

I added it to my .bashrc and can now simply type -

ff whatever

…and it searches the current directory and sub-dirs for anything containing “whatever”.

Nice one bloke :wink:

19

Rep points all round! (except for Palladium, who writes from a secret underground cave laboratory, and is not eligible for them…)

20

@ growbag:

Between google university and ken_yap (Bash alias with args. - openSUSE Forums), we’ve come up with this little number too;


function ffind() { find $1 -iname '*'$2'*' 2>/dev/null ; }

Usage: ffind [path] [name fragment]

Does much the same thing except with choice of path and cleaner output.

Wakou - I’d try this out. Put that line in ~/.bashrc (and in root’s ~/.bashrc if you want to be able to run it as root as well), then either run ‘source ~/.bashrc’ or just log out and log back in, and it should work.