Ubuntu – find files and print info

I haven't seen an answer that comes near the wishes of Chaitanya. If you want to search on filename, a combination of locate, find, ls and grep could be sufficient. But I think Chaitanya want to search for example for 'all files created before 2011'. This can perfectly done with find, but I can imagine it will take a long time searching through 1TB (depends more on the amount of files, not necessarily the total size). To speed this up I think indexing is inevitable. The problem of locate (indexing with updatedb) is that it doesn't index creation time.

So what Chaitanya need is something that indexes the needed attributes of files (file name, file size, creation date, more?). And later something that can search on these attributes. As far as I know there is no out-of-the-box solution for this on Ubuntu.

An important comment of Chaitanya: "Now the thing is that I am designing a php based web gui...". Because your problem sounds quite specific, maybe you want to build somehting yourself. Some suggestions:

• Index the files in a database (with cronjob) and use SQL to search.

• Use Lucene to index and search (Zend Lucene for PHP)

You need to use wildcards (*foo* instead of foo), multiple -name tests, and combine them with -and:

find . -name "*hello*" -and -name '*165*' -and -name "*920*" > search20170224.txt

If you have many different strings to search for, you can save them in a file where each string is a (space separated) column:

hello 165 920
goodbye 321 123

You can then iterate over the file and build the find query:

while read a b c; do
    find . -name "*$a*" -and -name "*$b*" -and -name "*$c*" > search."$a"_"$b"_"$c".txt
done