Is there a Win98-like search program for Puppy?

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disciple
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Is there a Win98-like search program for Puppy?

#1 Post by disciple »

I know some great work has gone into searchers for Puppy, but I still find myself resorting to kfind on occasion, as it is the only find program I have found that is user-friendly and (importantly) allows me to sort the results (eg by date), and to deal directly with the files it finds (instead of just presenting a text list.
Unfortunately kfind is sooooooooooo slow.
And most people don't have KDE.
Surely there is a similar but lightweight program out there somewhere...?

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WhoDo
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Re: Is there a Win98 like search program?

#2 Post by WhoDo »

disciple wrote:I know some great work has gone into searchers for Puppy, but I still find myself resorting to kfind on occasion, as it is the only find program I have found that is user-friendly and (importantly) allows me to sort the results (eg by date), and to deal directly with the files it finds (instead of just presenting a text list.
Unfortunately kfind is sooooooooooo slow.
And most people don't have KDE.
Surely there is a similar but lightweight program out there somewhere...?
Have you tried pfind? It comes standard with Puppy 2.15CE and 2.16 and was written for Puppy.

What about the search facilities in Xfe - X File Explorer?

Hope that helps.
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disciple
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#3 Post by disciple »

Thanks.
pfind is superb, but I guess what I'm really after is the ability to sort results (particularly by date).
I'm afraid I can't find any search facilities in XFE - but maybe that's because I'm using the latest version - have they been removed perhaps? Surely not! Maybe I'll try the old version again.
Now that I've played around with it a bit, I see that XFE is quite cool - I'm not really sure why I didn't like it when I first tried it.

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zigbert
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#4 Post by zigbert »

Right now I work rather intense with next version of Pbackup. But I'll take a look at the sort feature in Pfind after that.

disciple
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#5 Post by disciple »

Yes, I think it would work if you could just get it to create the symlinks with the same attributes as the original files (don't know if thats possible), and then you can sort by date with ROX.

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zigbert
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#6 Post by zigbert »

I have never made to do that.

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Nathan F
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#7 Post by Nathan F »

Zigbert -

I've never tried it with symlinks but if it were regular files I'd use the touch command with --reference.

Code: Select all

touch $TMPDIR/{symlink} --reference $ORIGINAL_FILE
Either that or you can just resolve the symlinks and the read the data from them, if you want to sort a list by date.

Code: Select all

for LINK in `ls $TMPDIR`
do
ORIGINAL=`readlink $LINK`
ls -l $ORIGINAL
That gives you the date and time the original file was created, along with a lot of other info about it. but ls -l won't work on a directory though. It will give the directory contents.

I think this thread ought to just be taken as some constructive criticism for Pfind, which is already quite good, to make it even better.

Nathan
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zigbert
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#8 Post by zigbert »

Thanks for the info, Nathan. I'll check it out. It will be useful in Pbackup.

For Pfind I got another plan... :wink:

Sigmund

disciple
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#9 Post by disciple »

For Pfind I got another plan...
the suspense is killing me :)

Random thoughts follow...

I think it might be very difficult to get the sort of functionality I'm talking about with the Pfind approach using symlinks.

eg. I do a search for all files with "don" in the name, then I sort them by date because there are too many, and then I go through and selectively change the names of some of them, and delete others.

With the Pfind approach I think this would only work if either the functionality was built into ROX to do things to the target of a symlink, or if someone wrote a couple of ROXapps or something - that would be quite cool - drag a symlink onto a ROXapp and it pops up a dialogue "do you really want to delete the target of this symlink", or drag it to another one and it says "what would you like to rename the target of this symlink to?"

I don't think that is a good way to design software though, but it might work :)

Rox can't even edit symlinks though (eg to fix a broken link), unless I'm missing something - that is a feature it really should have... Ah I see it does have this feature now - I just have to double click in the properties window. So there's a second major improvement - its a pity its so slow now though :(

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#10 Post by zigbert »

I don't really know what we will get, but I see possibilities to give Pfind more builtin power, instead of trying to integrate with rox.

The sort feature can act on target files without using symlinks. Pfind has today 2 different outputs, either symlinks or a textfile with filenames. (The one that shows in the overview). The textfile could hold more info than just filenames, and it would be possible to sort whatever file-information.

What if you could click on one file in the overview, and get a menu. (open with MIME-type, run, rename, delete).

Sigmund

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#11 Post by disciple »

:D Yes, then it would be exactly what I'm looking for :)
But where do you get the time to do all this? - you'd essentially have to do half of the design of a file manager - you could go all the way and have Pfiler :lol:

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#12 Post by zigbert »

A filemanager should manage your files and give you a limited searchfeature. Pfind is a filefinder and should give you limited filemanaging. And yes, thins takes time. Don't expect something in the very near future.

To make even more filemanager-functions, it would require drag'n drop. I haven't seen that in combination with gtkdialog, have you?

Sigmund

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Nathan F
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#13 Post by Nathan F »

The only part of gtkdialog that will do drag and drop is the file selection widget, which has this enabled because the gtk widget is already drag and drop aware. Basically if you drag a file to it from a filer window then the selector will jump to that directory/file from wherever it happens to be.

I wonder though, just how far things could be taken using either gtkdialog or gins, with glade files?

Nathan
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pp4mnklinux
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Thanks a lot

#14 Post by pp4mnklinux »

My vote goes to... PFIND... super- powerful
Distro: xenialpup64 7.5 XXL
Desktop Panel: JWM ~ FbBox 5.0

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