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 :(
So let’s imagine in a weeks time you have a slightly different issue, you need to do the same operations, but only up to 3 subdirectories deep.
On windows you’d be back to square one. on linux you just add -maxdepth 3 to the command you found and congrats it’s done.
You have learnt a permanent skill now.
I like your optimism :)
I haven’t learned a new skill, I just copied and pasted some commands from a website. As it is, I’ve been using Xubuntu on this server for a few years, and Mint on my laptop (on my PC now and then too, and permanently once I can get rid of Adobe), and I’m comfortable with the terminal. I grew up using DOS, and could set up gaming boot disks in my sleep. I just think it’s silly that to do something as basic as copying files, I had to resort to this. Someone new to Linux coming from Windows is not going to have a clue how to do it, and is likely to go back, all over one of the most basic operations a GUI should be able to do.
If they don’t want to learn the basics perhaps they should?
The basics doesn’t involve having to drop into the terminal because the file manager can’t do basic file operations. You’d probably complain about Windows making you switch between Settings and Control Panel because it’s bad design, but because this happened in Linux, it’s fine.