I’ve just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.
I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I’ve learned a ton but one thing I can’t seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I’m SSH’d to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I’m missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y’all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?
I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.
I’d love to hear any tips or tricks!
I use ls and ranger, to find files i use
find -name
and remember that * is used as a wildcard so you can use it when searching for stuff with in incomplete filename or when copying or moving files/directories. You could also use colorls to add some flare to your ls, and oh-my-zsh for syntax highlighting and tab autocompleteI know there is probably a historical reason but I hate how find parses its arguments.
Any other app would be fine --name or find -n.
Every time I use it I have to spend a few minutes checking the results to make sure that it’s actually doing what I want it to do.
That’s one of the reasons why the more modern
fd
is a nice alternative: it accepts command line args as you’d expect.Also every other search program has the needle as a positional argument and either reserves a named parameter to specify haystack, or has the haystack come after.
Apparently the
find
devs thought users would spend more time using it as an alternative tols -a
than finding specific files@BaumGeist @nathris try zsh plugins/ widgets in term, that helped me
Depending on system, something like
locate
/mlocate
might be installed, and is almost certainly available if the following seems like a good idea.Tools/daemons like them are quicker for finding files - basically because they index all files except those in specified places. (Or potentially only those in specified places depending on tool/configuration.)
That way, rather than
find -name 'some_wildcard_string'
, it’s insteadlocate 'partial_filename_match
orlocate --regex 'some_regex_string'
.As for speed:
locate / | wc -c
returned 565035, the count of files currently indexed bymlocate
on my computer, in 0.3 seconds. Quite a bit quicker thanfind
! (locate /
literally returns any file with a/
in the full pathname, which basically means every single file in its DB).