Hi. I'm dealing with millions and millions of small files in a directory structure and finding something with 'find' takes ages.
So I was wandering if there is a locate-like tool which periodically indexes the files, but instead of storing only the path names, it also stores the files' metadata (like permissions, ownership, modified time, size, etc.; basically everything that 'stat' reports). The tool would then allow me to search much in the same way as 'find' does, allowing for complex queries. I'm not interested in "desktop-search tools" (like tracker, Recoll, Beagle and friends) that index the contents of the files, I'm interested only and only in the files' path and metadata. After I have identified the files from metadata searches, I can then perform content searches using some other grep-like tools. I don't care that the indexing can take days, the files don't change very often and I can let the indexer run in the background with some lower ionice priority to not disturb the machine's disk IO subsistem too much. So, is there such a beast anywhere? I have searched high and low on the Internets but I haven't had any luck so far. Maybe somebody here knows something that I missed... Or maybe I have a wrong approach, don't know (I know that I can restrict find's maxdepth and I can tell it to start searching from a deeper path in the directory structure, but it's a hassle to find how deep I should go). BTW: why doesn't locate store files' metadata? I mean, it already passes through all the files, why does it store only the files' paths and names in the index? Thanks. -- Adrian Fita -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/50a55dcc.3030...@gmail.com
