Can a Puppy file manager perform this Windows search operation? [SOLVED]

[JASpup]

ROX, Thunar, or PCManFM -- any of them:

In Windows you can perform a file name search and have all those files recursively appear in one window for additional operations (cut, copy, [name-your-process], etc.).

Example: I have .epub eReader books sorted in directories three deep by type. I want all the files with "chem" in the filename in one gui file manager window so I can copy them to my reader.

I know there are advanced terminal commands to achieve this result, but wonder if a Puppy file manager can do it.

pFind will provide the search results, but they're not operable like they would be in a file manager.

[April]

May or may not help.

Search in PFind for say *.txt
This will bring up a list of files found , then right click->show location will give the show folder option which can be operated on as necessary and then closed and the PFind window is still open to do the next one.

[JASpup]

This will bring up a list of files found , then right click->show location will give the show folder option which can be operated on as necessary and then closed and the PFind window is still open to do the next one.

I'll be honest, that command scares me.

You can show location for a single file, but if multiple files are selected it should show all of them, which would mean opening many file windows, OR it wouldn't operate as expected which is another problem.

We want a BAM! THEY'RE ALL THERE! like I just found in PCManFM:

PCMan-search.png (11.79 KiB) Viewed 353 times

Now are the other two in league, or is the advanced file manager going to be leaning on @peebee's LXDE? (or finding a way to install PCMan elsewhere)?

[JASpup]

New dilemma:

xfce_pcmanfm.png (10.27 KiB) Viewed 347 times

This is PCManFM in Tahr XFCE, but Find Files... is greyed out.

[TerryH]

I believe pfind will achieve your goal. If you use Advance Search, you can target specific text 'chem*.epub' in specific directories. The resulting list should contain what you are after. In the top menu item Action, you can select copy, which will copy the entire list the search found.

Note: you don't need an asterix before the 'chem'

[April]

Man the stuff you are on is too strong!

[geo_c]

XFE file manager searches then allows the files to be cut, moved, copied from the search window with a right click action. XFE is in the ppm and easy to install, always works, been using it along side rox for years.

[MochiMoppel]

pFind will provide the search results, but they're not operable like they would be in a file manager.

You can do all the usual stuff. What do you miss? Drag&Drop?

[JASpup]

dilemma update:

Find Files... is greyed-out in Tahr JWM as well.

IT WORKS IN SLACKO6 XFCE.

I want Tahr, so grey-out is still the dilemma.

[JASpup]

I believe pfind will achieve your goal. If you use Advance Search, you can target specific text 'chem*.epub' in specific directories. The resulting list should contain what you are after. In the top menu item Action, you can select copy, which will copy the entire list the search found.

Note: you don't need an asterix before the 'chem'

From your experience, could pFind handle a drag and drop operation? That's the goal.

[JASpup]

Man the stuff you are on is too strong!

If I were a coder I'd smoke out to deal with the anxiety which I get on computers anyway.

I have been listening to a lot of Marley's Mr. Brown, but I don't really smoke at all.

[JASpup]

XFE file manager searches then allows the files to be cut, moved, copied from the search window with a right click action. XFE is in the ppm and easy to install, always works, been using it along side rox for years.

XFE works in Tahr and FAST.

You are the champ!

[JASpup]

pFind will provide the search results, but they're not operable like they would be in a file manager.

You can do all the usual stuff. What do you miss? Drag&Drop?

Hai
B-I-N-G-O

Are you going to the moon? Is Zozotown really that good?

[TerryH]

I just did a search, it gave me a list of 5 items. By using Shift + Left click (contiguous entries) or Ctrl + Left click (multiple individually clicked listed files I chose multiple items. Then right clicking on one item and chose Copy from the popup contextual menu.

So while not Drag &Drop, it would seem to me that this would meet your requirements. This is the first time I've done an operation like this, but it seems very effective. One observation, the searches I did missed one item, it showed 5, but I had 6 which met search criteria. When I copied all files, it was included in the directory I copied them to. No idea why.

[JASpup]

I just did a search, it gave me a list of 5 items. By using Shift + Left click (contiguous entries) or Ctrl + Left click (multiple individually clicked listed files I chose multiple items. Then right clicking on one item and chose Copy from the popup contextual menu.

Could be useful in pFind. I give it another shot next time.

[Geek3579]

Another suggestion is the use of fsearch. Its in the PPM for Bionicpup, at least.
See more details at https://www.fossmint.com/fsearch-search ... for-linux/

Once setup it is blisteringly fast. Not sure about file drag and drop...

[JASpup]

Fsearch is another one to check out.

XFE works fine in XFCE, though funny about it the interface matches JWM better.

It's so fast it seems like something's wrong, e g., how can it search so fast without a prior index?

[wiak]

Being written in C and using an index, fsearch is indeed very good for its file/folder search purpose. Yes, pcmanfm does have inbuilt search capability, similar, but nothing like so fast.

Both of above miss searching for text inside files. I don't have it installed, but seem to remember that Pfind can do that, but again quite slow.

Long ago, Google used to provide indexing Google Desktop search, which was amazing at the time (I believe Copernic may be same or similar anyway). Very useful is to have ability to search for text including wildcards, or better, regular expressions, and especially if text can extend to several lines. Some search programs allows looking for more than one text pattern with specified number of characters or words in between, which for some analysis purposes can be extremely handy. Again indexed searching is much the fastest and good if the program only indexes folders you tell it to rather than indexing whole system in background, which slows down your computer whilst in progress and takes a long time...

DocFetcher is one such sophisticated search program available in open source version - been around for a long time but no longer developed. Recently a non-free version has releases, which we don't probably want... Problem with DocFetcher is that it is a huge install being 81MB from Arch AUR for my WeeDogLinux_Arch64 system, and it also needs Javascript to operate (which I have in WDL_Arch64 since already using with LibreOffice).

http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

Simple tool fsearch is also available from Arch AUR.

In practice I rely heavily on commandline find utility for file searches, but more often I am searching for txt within files and simply use grep for that purpose (and with various filters including sed can do a lot of complicated searches with that), but not indexed so significantly slower than some of these alternatives I mentioned above.

I have to say I forgot how good filemanager xfe was for simple searching including internal text.

[JASpup]

Being written in C and using an index, fsearch is indeed very good for its file/folder search purpose. Yes, pcmanfm does have inbuilt search capability, similar, but nothing like so fast.

Both of above miss searching for text inside files. I don't have it installed, but seem to remember that Pfind can do that, but again quite slow.

PCcontent.png (16.36 KiB) Viewed 309 times

Graphic is PCManFM search. The Content (third) tab works great.

[wiak]

Graphic is PCManFM search. The Content (third) tab works great.

Ah, thankyou! I missed that. Nice for convenient text in file searches then (and useful to me since I pretty much always use pcmanfm on my current system). I will test that out for a while now to see whether it proves more convenient to me than my usual grep usage (of course grep will always work, no matter I have pcmanfm or xfe or whatever installed, and has the advantage of commandline pipe to filters of any complexity that proves useful).

EDIT: Excellent! How did I miss that??? I've looked at File Search in pcmanfm before and at the time thought 'oh that's pretty rubbish', but now I see it is actually pretty good! I'm still likely to use grep (and find) more - mainly because of the power of commanline pipes, but also to stop me forgetting how to do it(!) but I'll pass on the pcmanfm 'content search' method to my partner, who struggles to remember the find/grep method I demonstrated to her.

[JASpup]

I will test that out for a while now to see whether it proves more convenient to me than my usual grep usage (of course grep will always work, no matter I have pcmanfm or xfe or whatever installed, and has the advantage of commandline pipe to filters of any complexity that proves useful).

I took an intro Unix class in college (not recently) and remember the power of grep. Still using it & pipes in Puppy on a basic level.

Also still amazing to me is the relevance of DOS on a Windows system despite my basic belief it should have always been a stronger Linux foundation.

My challenge on this project now is I haven't learned if XFE can mount and unmount partitions as easily as Thunar & PCManFM.

What that means is in XFCE particularly I'm going to be running Thunar concomitantly as I don't leave all the partitions on an XFCE desktop. Pmount takes longer to load and isn't necessary.

All four Puppy gui file managers appear usable quality but it's not compelling to marry one for feature and interface needs and the fact that Thunar and PCManFM especially appear technically customized for the distros they're default on. They still work but beg tweaking.

UPDATE: XFE supports mounting and unmounting partitions, but if they haven't already been mounted, you don't see them in the first place. Iow, a partition has to already be unmounted for you to mount it, unless there's another functional secret to reveal.