Posts Tagged ‘search’

One of the irritating things about Spotlight Search in Mac is that you open want to open the folder that contains a file, but there is no obvious way to do this.

Luckily, there is a non-obvious way. And it’s pretty simple. Just hold down the Option key and double click on the file you want to open.

I put “how” into my search and these were the suggestions…

I was dragging an image from my desktop into a folder when it happened to pass over my browser with Google open on it. Suddenly, Google suggested that I might want to search the web using the image.

How well it works is debatable, but it is certainly interesting.

For example, if I upload the image I use as my avatar I get a series of pages that that image is used on. It also shows me visually similar images, but none of them are me.

I can see that finding where an image has been used can be useful. Not sure about the similar images though. However, it works better if you use a photo of a celebrity. It identifies the person and then tries to find relevant pages.

The image I uploaded was just called 11.jpg and doesn’t have much metadata, so it is quite impressive that it worked all that out from the image.

Need to locate a specific file somewhere on your system? Luckily, there is an appropriated named search tool which you can use to do that. It’s called locate and it’s very similar to file search in Windows file manager.

Not all Linux installs come with locate, so you may need to install it.

yum install locate

Also, the first time you run it, it will need to build the database, so that will take a little longer. But once it is up and running, it is pretty fast. Simply use the command followed by a file name, or even just part of a file name, to get a list of all the files on your system that match.

locate httpd.conf

If you use the Unix terminal, you’re probably familiar with grep. It’s a great search tool. But sometimes it is a little slow. Luckily, there is a faster version, with the original name of fgrep, though you might be surprised to learn it doesn’t actually stand for fast grep. But don’t be confused – it is faster.

You use it in avery similar way to the way you would use grep. So for most occasions, simply replace grep with fgrep for faster results.