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 :(
Shell commands are vastly more powerful than mouse actions.
It’s like the difference between being able to speak to someone using a shared language, versus only being able to point and grunt to get what you want.
The more you learn about using the shell, the more you’ll be able to do things very quickly and flexibly, without having to find an app that someone else has already written to do the precise thing you want.
Yes, shell commands are more powerful, but you shouldn’t need to learn a new language to do something as simple as waving hello to someone else.
What’s the point of a GUI file manager if it can’t handle very basic file operations?
Native speakers of the Unixish language (as it were) wouldn’t expect to use a mouse-clicky tool to do this sort of operation, because the shell is always there.
Don’t think of the shell as an exceptional tool that you should only use when other things fail. To develop fluency in the system you’ve chosen to learn, reach for shell commands first.