Is Beagle a Good Thing?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:30 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
> > 
> > But then you can use "find".  I use it all the time with hundreds 
> > (thousands?) of files in multiple directories with even more sub 
> > directories.
> 
> find only searches the file names - These desktop search tools do much 
> more than this - They search *inside* the files. They know how read most 
> of the common file formats (including images, searching the EXIM 
> comments and music files) and will match your search to any file which 
> matches.

But then, he'll say, he uses grep.

> 
> No use of find, or careful organisation of your file system can do this.

The other disadvantages of command-line tools are: 

- They can't re-use information learned in one scan to make another scan
more efficient.  Indexers index once (and incrementally after) and the
searches run against the indexed data--typically much faster.

- The traditional tools don't understand specialized files.  It doesn't
help much to know that your fedora-list mbox matches a phrase without
knowing which message it is, if you have a few hundred messages.

On the other hand, indexers:

- Use resources in the background, possibly at inconvenient times.

- Take up (possibly significant) disk space with indices.

- Index only what they recognize.

So each method has its good and bad points.

> 
> Chris
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs