I run Mylar on my Xubuntu server to manage my comic collection. I found out recently that there’s a tool that can convert the embedded .jpgs to .webp to save space, but it only works on cbz files and not cbr (zipped vs rar for those who don’t know). I wanted to convert all of my cbr to cbz so that I could run the tool on all my comics, so I needed to search hundreds of subdirectories for them and move them to the same folder to be processed.

Under Windows, I’d just type *.cbr into the search bar built into Explorer from the root comic directory, hit enter to get a list of files, select them all, and move them to the new folder. On Xubuntu, it’s nothing like as simple.

I found the search option in Thunar which opened Catfish, typed in *.cbr, and got a no files found message. After looking through the very limited options, I started searching for a way to do it. About thirty minutes later I’d found dozens of links telling me to use different, Terminal only, tools, but nothing about how to search subdirectories from the Catfish GUI. Purely by accident, I found a post from 2012 that mentioned the fact that Catfish doesn’t use wildcards, so just search with .cbr, something that’s not mentioned in the official docs.

I tried it, and it searched the subdirectories too, and found my files! Except there was no way to copy or cut and paste, just open, show in file manager, copy location, save as, or delete. No good options for almost 500 files across several dozen locations.

I ended up asking Chat GPT how to do it, and doing it through the Terminal, using this:

‘find . -type f -name “*.cbr” -exec mv {} /path/to/destination ;’

This is pretty basic functionality, and I had to resort to getting help to use the Terminal :(

  • Lucia@eviltoast.org
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    1 year ago

    Since xfce 4.18 Thunar can search files w/o catfish perfectly fine btw. Do Xubuntu still uses the previous version?

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Thunar is currently on 4.16.10. I just checked for updates, and Thunar isn’t in the list. It may be part of one of the other packages that are available, but I haven’t had a chance to check properly yet.

      It’s good to know that Catfish is being phased out though, I’m not a fan of it.

      • Lucia@eviltoast.org
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        1 year ago

        I assumed Xubuntu to have the latest xfce version since Linux Mint updated their not so long ago, but it seems they did it on their own.

        4.18 is a really good update for xfce and especially Thunar - search for files in subdirectories is as simple as to press ctrl+F and start typing. I really hope Xubuntu will get it soon.