Is Beagle a Good Thing?

[Robin Laing]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:30 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
>>> But then you can use "find".  I use it all the time with hundreds 
>>> (thousands?) of files in multiple directories with even more sub 
>>> directories.
>> find only searches the file names - These desktop search tools do much 
>> more than this - They search *inside* the files. They know how read most 
>> of the common file formats (including images, searching the EXIM 
>> comments and music files) and will match your search to any file which 
>> matches.
> 
> But then, he'll say, he uses grep.

How true.  :)  You must be a mind reader.

> 
>> No use of find, or careful organisation of your file system can do this.
> 
> The other disadvantages of command-line tools are: 
> 
> - They can't re-use information learned in one scan to make another scan
> more efficient.  Indexers index once (and incrementally after) and the
> searches run against the indexed data--typically much faster.
> 
> - The traditional tools don't understand specialized files.  It doesn't
> help much to know that your fedora-list mbox matches a phrase without
> knowing which message it is, if you have a few hundred messages.
> 
> On the other hand, indexers:
> 
> - Use resources in the background, possibly at inconvenient times.
> 
> - Take up (possibly significant) disk space with indices.
> 
> - Index only what they recognize.
> 
> So each method has its good and bad points.
> 
>> Chris
>>
>>

One issue with all this pre-compiled database is it makes things easy 
for someone else to trace your actions.  Maybe I am paranoid but I found 
that even "locate" can reveal to much information that I don't want 
easily found.


But this is my preference.

I want to start encrypting everything on the laptop and many files on 
the desktop.

-- 
Robin Laing