Ubuntu – The difference between “find” and “locate” search methods in Catfish

With gnome-search-tool and catfish, command-line options are available and so the programs can integrate into Thunar quite nicely; the --path=%f option is important as that means the location of the selected folder (with its files) can be passed on to these search tools so they open at the right folder.

If you enter the name of the program and then add--help, you will see all the command-line options for these two search tools: for gnome-search-tool --help we have many options such as:

 --named=STRING                  Set the text of "Name contains" search option
 --path=PATH                     Set the text of "Look in folder" search option

With catfish there are similar options, but it used to be essential to specify --fileman=thunar in addition to --path=%f. This was found to be necessary as catfish used to only open the home folder, not the one selected if the fileman workaround was not used. However, it works now with just --path=%f with Catfish 0.3.2 and Thunar 1.2.3 on Xubuntu 12.04.

It doesn't seem to be possible to pass any command-line options to searchmonkey, and there doesn't seem to be any information available: the mailing-lists and forums seem pretty empty. Even if you set the filemanager and options in searchmonkey > settings > preferences > systemcalls, and then specify options in the custom action, it doesn't seem to integrate into Thunar successfully.

Searchmonkey doesn't seem to integrate with other filemanagers either after testing, so it must be because it does not accept any suitable command-line options. The only way to make it integrate would be to create a patch for it and recompile it, which is probably not really worthwhile considering how useful catfish is.

-exec ... \; will run one item after another. So if you have three files, the exec line will run three times.

-exec ... {} + is for commands that can take more than one file at a time (eg cat, stat, ls). The files found by find are chained together like an xargs command. This means less forking out and for small operations, can mean a substantial speedup.

Here's a performance demo catting 10,000 empty files.

$ mkdir testdir
$ touch testdir/{0000..9999}

$ time find testdir/ -type f -exec cat {} \;
real    0m8.622s
user    0m0.452s
sys     0m8.288s

$ time find testdir/ -type f -exec cat {} +
real    0m0.052s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m0.037s

Again this only works on commands that can take multiple filenames. You can work out if your command is like that by looking at its manpage. Here's the synopsis from man cat:

SYNOPSIS
       cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...

The ellipsis on [FILE]... means it can take more than one file.

+ can only be used on single commands and you must have exactly one {} in the line. \; can operate with multiple zero-to-many groups.