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Asked: 2021-03-22 09:29:50 +0800 CST

How to search in Linux from the terminal, on an external HDD, for photos, by name

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OS: Lubuntu.

Can someone please, help, which is the command from the terminal(cmd) to search on all the external HDD, on all its folders and sub-folders. I would like to search for all the photos having this inside of their names: "202010"

Are there two/three different commands if some of the photos could have in there name some characters in front of "202010" and other photos could have some characters after "202010", or maybe both ways, characters in front and after "202010" ?

Is there any update command, from the terminal, for updating the last photos copied on the external HDD, from another machine, then the machine where I actually connect the external HDD, and search for photos? Or the photos will be indexed anyway by the new machine?

command-line

2 Answers

  1. The brute force to perform this is to use the find standard command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix)

    find <base directory> -name '202010*.jpg'

    The quotes around the file pattern ensure that it is not matched against the file in your current directory, and transmitted as a pattern to find. The pattern is your way to express if you want

    • exactly 202010.jpg: -name '202010.jpg'
    • anything starting with 202010: -name '202010*.jpg'
    • anything containing 202010: -name '*202010*.jpg'

    This will get you going, but using find massively, especially find / <whatever query> is a bad practice and is slow, you can do better. In most of the cases, Linux comes installed with a system called locate, or mlocate (Ubuntu, see https://www.howtoforge.com/linux-locate-command/ ).

    By using another process that scans the disk regularly (once a day), locate builds a database that makes the search for something like locate '202010*.jpg' very efficient (seconds instead of minutes).

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  2. For me the easiest way to search is by console, and easy ones for me are these.

    $ find /path -name '*202010*'

    or

    $ find /path | grep 202010
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