Linux Mint Forums

Tried using Catfish to find a file in the File System which I expected would take only seconds. Unfortunately despite asking Catfish to search the File System it decided it needed to search every drive, including USB drives. I tried to stop it after about 10 minutes but it refuses to allow this. I decided to terminate it .... ...the GUI closes but it refuses to stop it's search. Rebooting is only way I have found to stop it. Surely there must be a better program than Catfish?

Far and away the best search tool is the 'locate' command, it only has one drawback which is that it will only find files that existed the last time its database was updated (although you can always work round this by updating its database before you search with 'sudo updatedb').

If you wanted to find the file 'myfile' run
or if you don't know if it has capitals or not
This is infinitely faster than 'Find'.

Alternatives are gnome-search-tool (which is called 'search for files' in the gnome menu or the search button in your file manager (they all have one somewhere).

As for processes that wont stop open a terminal and in your particular case run:
Having said all that I have never found anything wrong with Catfish, it is just that 'locate' is so much easier (and yes I know Catfish can use locate as well as find but if you set it up wrongly it doesn't work as you expect it to, it is pretty well impossible to not use the 'locate' command properly).

If you download the "beagle" (search indexer) debian package, Catfish can serve as a front end for the beagle indexer. After installing beagle and creating its index... in the Catfish selectbox, along with options for "find" and "locate", the additional option "beagle" will be available.

IMO, the "best search tool" is recoll ( www.recoll.org )
It's available as a .deb package; unsure whether it's in the Mint repository.
You can either allow it to run as a daemon, enabling it to continually keep its index up to date,
or just launch index updates on-demand, via the recoll GUI.

Thanks for the helpful advice.

I have installed recoll via Synaptic. Recoll finds what want in a split second.
Beagle wasn't available.

I am a bit disabled so now I struggle with things I once was able to easily do before serious injury and illness and it's so nice to get friendly helpful advice on a Linux forum as my previous experience with another Distro was one of I asking a question and basically receiving ridicule, arrogant comment, and what I considered to be abuse. Having now read quite a lot on the Web I realise that many others have made similar comments about the 'help' they received from the same Distros forum.

I am becoming more and more impressed with Linux Mint, and it's community. Thanks again

Clam has found a possible threat in Recoll. I have deleted it.

Surely it's a "false positive". Still, you might want to post the issue to the project's bugtracker:

https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/issu ... tatus=open

It is not a false positive!
After restart I open programs but they all go to upper left-hand of the corner of the screen. Cannot minimise or maximise as no option available. Cannot move application window across the screen.

No open application appears on the shelf. I tried to take a screenshot but it saves with default screen capture name which includes the time and date. I cannot upload this as it is rejected by the forum server. I opened GIMP but was unable to save as I am not allowed type a name in the field.

Had to copy over 15,000 files this morning, before the restart, and it was constantly locking-up. Processors at 100% and clock was not updating the time. Had to constantly hit cancel which took well over 5 minutes each time to actually cancel.

Used Bleachbit, including Root. Cleared out 79Mb.

Then I enabled 'hidden files' in Thunar and went thru a load of Directories and files and took out anything I thought should not be there. It was a bit risky as I'm not really sure what I'm doing but I thought I can always do a clean install from DVD (and all the updates) again. I keep backups of what I need but I don't bother doing an image of the system to do a restore. Would probably be best but I just prefer to do a clean install.

Anyway, I rebooted, no change. I checked everything again and could not see anything out of place so I rebooted yet again. I cannot believe it is working normally again! I can move open windows, I can minimise and maximise, Programs all appear on the shelf as normal.

It's been a terrible waste of time but all is well again.

I saw that you filed a bug report. Thanks for that (I would have filed it, but for some reason I couldn't post to the form on the bitbucket page.)

I'm sorry it didn't work out for you. I consider Recoll to be one of my most valuable apps.

It's working fine now since I run Clam, and deleted a few files. Thanks.