#####[ Searching for installed programs, files, and manuals ]##### Searching for installed programs -------------------------------- 1. If in a graphical desktop environment, by default, you can use "Super+Spacebar" to open an application finder of some kind; an i486 machine will use 'gRun' and everything else uses 'xfce4-appfinder.' 2. The other way is to make use of the 'apropos' command and tab completion. For example, you want to convert an image files but your machine has enough RAM to technically run a graphical desktop environment such as JWM but is still too slow to be wasting time opening various Graphics applications, not to mention any memory leak potentials. What do you do? Open a terminal and run 'apropos convert'. This will use the 'apropos' command to search through available manual pages ('man') and then list apropriate software with summaries for each one. Unfortunately, for what ever reason, Slacko Puppy 5.3.1 is a bit lacking in the manpage dept. unless it is software that you installed yourself and includes it. Tab completiong can also be used in cases in which you cannot remember the entire name of a program. Open a terminal and type 'pup' and then press the TAB key twice. You will then see a list of programs that contain the word "pup" in them. When a program name autocompletes after just one TAB keypress, then that program is the only one that contains the word you used. You can find out where autocomplete is looking for these programs by running 'echo $PATH' in a terminal. **I would like to note also, that WINE and DOSEMU are included, as well as software in the "/opt" directory. The directory that WINE normally uses when an installer is ran was symbollically linked to ~/WINE/Programs. The DOSEMU software is placed inside of "~/.dosemu/drive_c". Files ----- 1. PsychOS486, by default, comes with two graphical file search options, "pFind" and 'Searchmonkey.' Both work really well, but unless you have 256MB or more RAM, do not use 'Searchmonkey.' 2. PsychOS486 also includes "/opt/psychos486tools/YAD/look4", which is a very simple file search script that has an input area for a starting point and an input area for the file name. There is also an "UpdateDB" button; this is because it uses the 'locate' command. 2. In my opnion, the 'locate' and 'updatedb' commands are probably the easiest to use whether you are in a graphical environment or console. All you have to do is run 'updatedb' to update the file search database and then use 'locate [file or part of file] | less' and a long list will appear. Because this example is "pipping" locate to the 'less' command, you can then use "/" to search and "q" to quit. Manuals ------- To search manuals, you mainly would use the 'apropos' command. However, much of the software that came with Slacko Puppy 5.3.1, for whatever reason, does not have a manpage. But when in doubt, you can always try running 'man [program' to see if it does have something. You keep these manpage listing updated by running 'makewhatis' in the command-line; PsychOS486 does this at each boot just in case. However, I would also like to note that some software, especially the GUI kind, often places documentation in the form of HTML files inside of "/usr/docs". If you need particular help with something, such as with Python but do not want to run 'help()' inside of the interpreter, you can try running: curl http://cht.sh/python or curl http://cht.sh ...to learn how to use this URL with curl. Remember to keep it "http" and not "https" because of PsychOS486's SSL-related issues. !! You can also try using web browsers such as 'links', 'lynx' and 'Dillo' if you need a search box instead. Or if you cannot remember the URL, in BASH, use 'howin python' to utilize the supplied "~/.bashrc's" "howin" function. #####[ Searching inside of files ]##### Less ---- This is probably the quickest way other than by actually opening a file with an editor and then hoping it has a search feature. All you have to do is open a terminal, type 'less' and then either type out the full file path or drag-and-drop the file and press ENTER. The file will open using the 'less' program and then you can use the keyboard shortcut "/" to search and will highlight all instances of the word or phrase. Keep using "/" and then ENTER without typing anything to go through each instance of the found word or phrase. Use "q" to quit. Grep ---- To quickly search the contents of a file, you can open a terminal, type the full file path or drag-and-drop the file to be search, and use 'grep' like so: grep 'search something' '/path/to/large/text/file.txt' reXgrep ------- However, what if you have a directory loaded with files and cannot remember which one contains the words "hello world"? This is where the 'reXgrep' GUI program is very helpful. Normally, on most newer GNU/Linux systems you could run "grep -R 'hello world'" in a terminal at whatever starting directory to recursively search, but that does not work on this distribution for whatever reason; it just hangs. find ---- This example is a bit more complex but maybe not. Let's search the "/root" directory for a file containing the world 'puppy' and not care about the name of the file or extension... find "/root" -iname "*" -exec grep 'puppy' "{}" \; If you want to only list ".txt" files... find "/root" -iname "*.txt" -exec grep 'puppy' "{}" \; Basically, the '-iname "*"' part tells 'find' that you do not care if the file name is upper or lowercase. The "*" is a wildcard character and basically means "anything." If you do care about upper or lowercase letters, than use "-name" instead. Hopefully this makes since and if not, always remember to give 'find --help' a try. #####[ Searching inside of archive files ]##### I'm not really an expert on this at all, but you have the following options that may or may not be helpful... - bzgrep - lzegrep - lzfgrep - lzgrep - xzegrep - xzfgrep - xzgrep - zcat - zegrep - zfgrep - zgrep - zipgrep