File search, sort and view.

e_james · 01-29-2019, 11:27 AM

Windows XP has a rather useful file search facility. I can search multiple folders, partitions and drives for jpg files and sort the results by size, name, date etc. That much I can also do in Linux. With XP I can also open a picture viewer and scan through the images in the sorted order. If there is a way to do that in Linux, I haven't found it yet. Every Linux viewer I have tried so far, looks only at the folder of the file I viewed first. Just at this time the XP behaviour would be very useful. Any suggestions?

l0f4r0 · 01-29-2019, 11:32 AM

Can't you give a list of sorted files to your Linux picture viewer via a pipe for example?

e_james · 01-29-2019, 12:06 PM

Thank you for your reply.

The benefit of gui software is that I can usually muddle through to a satisfactory result without learning many of the details of the application. The problem with the command line is that every letter, dot, dash and comma has to be right and the man pages are almost useless for new users. Can you give me an example command to get me started?

syg00 · 01-29-2019, 04:49 PM

I use feh as my quick photo viewer - it accepts a file of filenames. You could also use xargs piped from the find command - these should work.

Code:

feh -f photos.lst
ls Pictures/*beach* | xargs feh
find Pictures/ -iname "*beach*jpg" | xargs feh

l0f4r0 · 01-30-2019, 05:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00

Code:

ls Pictures/*beach* | xargs feh
find Pictures/ -iname "*beach*jpg" | xargs feh

Beware of filenames with special characters, you could run into trouble with those 2 commands...
I suggest (please note I don't use feh myself so it's only theory here applied to your previous post):

Code:

for file in Pictures/*beach*; do echo "$file"; done | feh
find Pictures/ -iname "*beach*jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 feh
find Pictures/ -iname "*beach*jpg" -exec feh "{}" \;

syg00 · 01-30-2019, 05:11 AM

Not me - I know how to name files ....

Others may need to heed your warning.

e_james · 01-30-2019, 09:09 AM

My thanks to both of you. Consider the problem solved as of now. For the benefit of other possible readers, I want to write more but I'm a bit pressed for time just now. I will come back later.

l0f4r0 · 01-30-2019, 09:59 AM

^ Great. Do not hesitate to mark your thread as [SOLVED] then (see HOWTO in my sig) and keep us posted with what you "want to write more"