FIND, Copyright © 1989, by Larry Phillips. This program may be freely distributed, in its entirety only, including updatedb, find, and find.doc. No chage may be made for this program beyond a reasonable media charge. It may be distributed on any public or private BBS or telecommunication service, provided there are no extra charges for downloading, beyond normal connect time fees. If you use find, and like it, if it saves you time, or if you have comments, criticisms or a wish list, please send me a postcard from where you live. Consider the cost of the postcard and stamp a shareware fee. If I could include the card and stamp in the distribution, I would. Send to: Larry Phillips 3575 E. 28th Ave. Vancouver, BC, Canada V5R 1T4 ------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATEDB: creates the files used by find --------- Updatedb will create a file called 'find.codes' in a directory called 'FindDB:'. It will take a while, so don't panic (it takes about 4 1/2 minutes on my setup, but the time taken will depend entirely on how many directories and files you are catalogging). The file created will only match the actual contents of your partitions until you save, delete, or move files around, but it is a simple matter to run updatedb once a day (more or less, depending on your disk activity, and how long you can remember the changes you make on your disks). Syntax: updatedb [ [-v] dhn: dhn: ...] dhn: device name. -v: verbose mode. This is a debuggin feature for updatedb, in case you have a problem with a partition or filename. It will show you which directory it was working on when it failed. The directory names are sent to the screen, delimited with vertical bars ('|'), in a different colour. The -v option is used only when entering the partition names on a command line. Examples: updatedb ; take arguments from FindDB:find.config updatedb dh0: dh1: ; catalog dh0: and dh1: updatedb -v dh1: ; catalog dh1:, verbose. If you specify partitions on the command line, they will be used to generate the find.codes file. If you don't specify partitions, updatedb will look for a file in your 'FindDB:' directory called 'find.config'. This file should have _only_ one line in it, consisting of the partitions you want to include in the catalog, separated by spaces. In either case, the last partition named in 'find.config' or on the command line will be the first one processed, so you should put them in order of least likely to most likely to be searched. updatedb may be stopped by typing a CTRL C. It will stop after processing the directory it is working on. find.codes: This is a straightforward file, consisting of directory names and file names, separated by NULL bytes. (hex 00). Directory names will always end with a colon (':') or a slash ('/'). The order is as follows: dirname/ NULL filename NULL filename NULL dirname/ NULL filename NULL ... ================================= FIND: find files and directories on hard disk ----- Find uses a database file called 'find.codes', to quickly find any directory or file. These two files are created by the companion program 'updatedb'. Output from the program may be halted at any time by pressing CTRL C. I debated a long time on where to check for the CTRL C, for speed considerations,and finally decided to check only when a match was detected, and right after the directory search. This means that the directory will be completely searched if there are no matches. It ends pretty quickly anyway (see comments on speed below). Syntax: find [-e] string string : the string to match. Without the '-e' argument, the string need only be contained in the directory or file entry. For example, the string 'game' will match 'game', 'games', or 'endgames'. See '-e' below for exact matches. -e : Optional, [E]xact. Matches directories and filenames only if the string argument matches exactly. For example, the argument 'game' will not match a directory or file named 'games' -d : Only match on directory names. -f : Only match on file names -v : Verbose. Show a header for directories and one for files. The above flags can be combined in any way. The only one that doesn't make sense if using -f and d ( -fd ) at the same time. Since the function of these flags is exclusionary in nature, you are excluding files and directories. ================================= Setting it up ------------- Find and updatedb contain a few 'hardwired' assumptions. The first assumption: I have an assigned directory called 'FindDB:' You can set up a directory like this, and make the assignment, or if you wish to have your find files elsewhere, use a file zapper to change the path/filename in both programs. I welcome suggestions on how best to set up the configurability. The second assumption is only in updatedb, and that is that if no command line arguments are given, it looks for them in 'FindDB:find.config' ================================= Everyday usage: --------------- I usually run updatedb once per day, either before going to bed or before going to work. It would be a good candidate for putting in a crontab to run at some time you will not be using the machine. Find is extremely fast, especially when compared with searching a disk with DIR or LIST. If I invoke it with a string that I know will not be found (eliminating screen output time), it will do a complete search in between 2 and 7 seconds, depending on the length of the pattern searched for (longer patterns take less time). Before you groan and tell me that isn't fast, let me tell you about my find files and disk partitions... My FindDB:find.codes is 133351 bytes long, consisting of 1174 directory entries and over 10,000 file entries If you are anything like me, you forget where things are, and waste a lot of time looking for them. On my current setup, it would take me over 5 minutes to do a 'dir all' of all partitions, and more time still to search the output for the file I want. The disk space overhead in having the find files is quite small. Now for 2.0, the new output format of find allows you to do some very things. The 2.0 AmigaShell has what is known as 'backtick' capability. This allows you to use the backtick character (the character below the tilde, to the left of the '1' key), to surround a command, and to use the results as input to the command itself, just as if you had typed the arguments in. Here ara couple of examples. First, using standard Amigados commands... First, the search command.. search #?.(c|h) MyFunction nonum quiet The above command will show you the names of all files in the current directory, ending in .c or .h, that contain the string 'myfunc'. Now you can combine it with another command, such as list... list `search #?.(c|h) MyFunction nonum quiet` In this command, the files are searched, just as in the search used alone, but the results are sent to 'list' to be used as command arguments, and all the files containing 'myfunc' will be listed. Find is one of the handiest programs to use in this manner. If you always call temporary files by the same name, such as 'junk' or 'foo' or 'tmp', and if you know that you do not have any files containing worthwhile info that are called by those names, you can get rid of them all in one command. delete `find -fe junk` Another possibility... you have a number of files scattered around the disk that are really the same file, but you only ant to keep the most recent one. Rather than looking all over and hoping you don't miss any, you can use find. Beter, you can use find in a backtick to list them, allowing you to see the date... list `find -fe macros.asm` Perhaps you want to edit the files. Assume you are using CEDPro... ed `find -fe macros.asm` The possibilities are endless. ================================= Enjoy! Larry Phillips: CIS - 76703,4322 Usenet - lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca or uunet!van-bc!lpami!lphillips