desktop searching: HOWTO?
thomas fisher
studio1 at commspeed.net
Sun Dec 23 19:15:14 UTC 2007
On Sunday 23 December 2007 06:06:25 John DeCarlo wrote:
> On Dec 23, 2007 4:57 AM, Alain Muls <alain.muls at telenet.be> wrote:
> > I tried google-desktop, beagle, tracker to perform search on my local
> > hard disk the way it does on my son's iMAC. But all in vain.
> >
> > None of these search engines was able to index my latex files, pdf files
> > and thunderbird mails. How can I tune one of them so that these items
> > get indexed?
>
> I only know about google desktop. Here is what I have done to improve the
> defaults, which sounds like it would help you, too.
>
> Go into Google Desktop Preferences. It should be in your menu if you are
> installing from the Google apt repository.
>
> I went and added my /home/user/.mozilla folder (yours may be different, I
> think Ubuntu may use .mozilla-thunderbird), on the theory that it is a
> hidden folder and I am not sure how it finds your email directory.
>
> Very importantly, under the Display section, make sure that the search box
> defaults to your local files - my default was the web.
If you want to go beyond point and click you might give these power commands a
go:
From the command line:
1) "locate" and or "slocate" both operate upon the "updatedb" data base.
I believe the updatedb is a standard in Ubuntu.
2) "grep"
3) "find"
4) If you want to increase your power learn some about:
- "regular expressions" { regexp }
- " * " the wildcard specifier.
5) To learn more about the useage and syntax of these commands use the
" man locate " to access the resident knowledge base for " locate ";
etc.
note: When working at the command level " MC " { midnight commander } a take
off from Peter Norton's DOS filecommander is very convenient and powerful.
An overview of some OS indexers
http://www.infomotions.com/musings/opensource-indexers/
-> swish++ http://www.searchtools.com/tools/swishpp.html
Hope this may be of use.
Tom
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