nautilus search
 

I'm having real trouble getting the Search function to work in Nautilus. It seems to be able to find text present in a file in the directory I'm currently in, but how does one do a search on filenames, or dates? I did a search on this forum for similar problems, and other people have had trouble too, but no real resolutions were suggested, other than using "locate" in the shell. But I cannot see any way dates can be search for here, either.

Say for instance I wanted to search for *.jpg files saved across my system between 1 March 2008 and today. What utility would I use, and how would I do it? Can it even be done with Nautilus? Or the shell?

Steve Wylie

Indeed, the search function in Nautilus is minimal. However, you can install a little add-on called nautilus-search-tool that will add an entry in the right-click context menu. After installation you have to restart the desktop manager, then open Nautilus and right-click over an empty area of the nautilus windows. Select "Search for files" and add your preferred search criteria under "Select more options".

FYI, from the command line you can try the find command which let you search files based on a lot of criteria. For example, you can look for files newer than a given file. First create an empty (dummy) file with modification time at 1 March 2008
then find all files newer than this dummy file, e.g.

Thanks for that. I downloaded the suggested Nautilus search tool, but it's not a package so it needs to be compiled (groan!) I'll have a stab at it but I've never yet successfully compiled anything in Linux!

I just had a thought - although I normally use Gnome Nautilus, I have Konqueror installed (it came with the distro). I don't like Konqueror generally but I just tried the search function and it actually works. So if I don't get the Gnome one working, I guess I can always switch to Konqueror for searches, if I really need to.

I'll also look into the Find command, but it looks rather limited if you have to do that dummy-file creation thing. But thanks for the extra info.

Steve