While desktop search engines like Beagle and Recoll can quickly find any file on your hard disk, they can't help you organize documents and files into neat and easy-to-manage collections. That's why we have tools like digiKam for managing your photos, BasKet Note Pads for keeping tabs on your notes, and Referencer for filing and tagging your documents.

Yesterday’s post detailed how you can find files by their name, permissions, time, or other descriptors. But you probably also want to be able to find files based on what is inside them. Grep is a tool that picks up where find left off, and can search inside files (though cannot do the same things that find can).

If you own a large number of CD or DVD media disks, you might have a hard time finding a specific file or folder on one of them -- unless you use GTKtalog. This utility scans every file and folder on your storage media and saves the captured information in a single-file searchable database named CDkatalog.

"Recently I had to edit a huge amount of files (239 in total) scattered in a bunch of directories and subdirectories.What I had to do was add the Google Analytics script snippet to a part of a website that was being maintained by a pair of 'your favorite bad adjective here'. So, first I thought of using sed or awk or something like that.

Look at methods for determining disk usage across multiple UNIX® systems and how to create a simple warning system to alert you of potential problems. Keeping an eye on your file systems and ensuring they don't fill up is a trivial, but ital process in the day-to-day management of your UNIX systems.

If you have a huge collection of music files already, sometimes you realize that you were too lazy to add tags and/or descriptive file names to them. It’s a mess!

There is always a time when working with the CLI that you will want to find a set of files by name, such as all JPEG images. The `find` command lets you do this and more. Let’s jump into the basic structure of a find command:

Backups are essential, and so is the reducing the time needed to perform those backups. Many’s the time I have sat waiting for a backup to complete only to remember that I had a link to a large set of files, or a bunch of ISO files in the ./download directory, and had to migrate those over to somewhere else and restart the backup.

Just upgraded your system with a shiny new hard disk and want to make it your new book disk? Cloning Ubuntu to another hard disk is easy. In fact, Ubuntu provides tools to clone the entire hard disk -- including the Windows partition, if there's one on there. This is the kind of fundamental task that Linux excels at, in fact.