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When I used Windows, there was an extremely useful program I used called "Everything" by voidtools to search for files/folders.

It could instantaneously search all files on every drive by keeping and automatically updating an index of all files. Before I try to get it to run in WINE, is there an Ubuntu/Linux native equivalent of this program?

I know and use the find command. It works fine for small folders, but the nice thing about Everything is because it uses an index, all searches are instantaneous even if you search all folders from the root.

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  • From your description it looks like you want to search for all files / directories below a certain given point. Did You have a look at the *nix find command?
    – albert
    Commented 2 days ago
  • 2
    I know and use the find command. It works fine for small folders, but the nice thing about Everything is because it uses an index all searches are instantaneous even if you search all folders from the root.
    – raphael75
    Commented 2 days ago
  • Note that it's unlikely that Everything will work under Wine. Everything reads the NTFS USN journal, which won't exist on your ext/btrfs/zfs/etc filesystem. And from this (old) bug report, it still doesn't work on Linux even with a mounted NTFS filesystem because Wine doesn't implement the required APIs.
    – josh3736
    Commented 21 hours ago
  • See also this question from 2012, “Is there a file search engine like "Everything" in Linux?” which has several suggestions.
    – josh3736
    Commented 21 hours ago

2 Answers 2

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You can use locate. This program uses indexes and searches for filenames. The indexes are created by a program named updatedb. If you want to have up-to-date indexes, you can add it in cron to index (for example) every hour or so.

You can check also these Q/A

"Search is useless. How can I force it to index my hard drive?" - Ask Ubuntu - WinEunuuchs2Unix's answer

"How can I index my entire disk in Ubuntu?" - Super User - Joey Adams's answer

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Recoll is a graphical full-text search tool for the desktop, but I no longer use it.

For 99% of desktop search cases, I use locate (and its companion, the indexer updatedb).

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