James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
Ralph Shumaker wrote:
I don't have the skills to search contents of files recursively, tho I
didn't do too bad at it just now. I still have too much to learn about
it for it to be useful to me.
I seem to have lost the trend of this conversation, so I haven't trimmed
anything above. However, I refuse to let confusion on my part keep me
from furthering the thread! ;-)
..anyway.. search recursively is not so daunting a task. The most
difficult part is specifying _what_ to search (ie, which files).
You can try the gui tools, eg the search-button within nautilus. And if
searching for content is a frequent chore, maybe you should look as
special tools for that -- isn't that what beagle does? There are
probably more
But grep does quite a decent job. One of my favorite command line
recipes is:
grep -slri 'text to search for' /home/jsack/workdir
*That* is _*so*_ much better than the way I was using grep to try to do
the same thing.
Lookup the options in 'man grep', and it should be understandable.
I also frequently add one other option to restrict the files being searched:
grep -slri --include='*.py' '^import' /home/jsack/python
If your search is really complicated, nothing beats combining the find
program with grep. But getting comfortable with find _is_ somewhat
intimidating. I thought I recently saw a gui front-end to find, but I
can't (umm,) find it just now.
I didn't find that file using that method. I just went poking around
more or less where I was before and found the file. Somehow, my
rearranging stuff caused a few lines in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to be
changed from 'XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy"' to 'XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/.Trash/yyy"'.
Problem solved by changing back to:
XDG_Pictures_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
Since that works, I will now change back the other 3 lines that got
changed in the same way.
Interesting that this file somehow was aware of the moves I made to
those directories. But if I move the target of a link, the link is
unaware and becomes broken.
The symbolic link feature is a simple mechanism. It merely contains the
[path_to/]name of the target and has an attribute-bit set so that the OS
knows it is a link. You can see the actual contents by the following.
readlink ho
stat ho
If you delete, rename, or move the target, the link is untouched. I'm
not sure if this is a universally accepted term, but I call it a "stale
link".
Is there any such thing as a link whose link will follow the target?
You can do more experiments to perhaps fix these ideas in your memory.
- - -
echo 'hello again' >> hi
ln -sf hi ho
cat ho
rm hi
cat ho
readlink ho
- - -
I've added a couple extra options to previous example lines. Extra
credit if you figure out what they are, and why I added them.
Regards,
..jim
Don't have time at the moment. But I'll check that out a little later.
Thanks.
--
Ralph
--------------------
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands
explained.
--Mark Twain
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