You’re looking for something. You know you saw it somewhere: on the desk, on the computer, in a book, in the newspaper, in the agenda… it’s somewhere, but where? After spending time finding things (except the one you’re looking for) you give up: “Who knows where it is…”. At this precise moment, Murphy’s Law has just been fulfilled:

You always find what you’re not looking for.

And it’s true, and it’s scientifically proven.

Now, let’s take the problem to finding something on the computer: we read it in a specific email, a conversation in our instant messenger or a post on some blog, but we don’t know where to look. One possibility is to run this in the console:

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~$ grep -R somethingYouAreSearching *

… and someday we’ll find it, among all the junk that command will throw out, guaranteed. Another possibility is to use Beagle.

Beagle is a utility for searching things. You can search in different domains:

• Obviously, the filesystem.
• In Evolution and KMail emails.
• In Gaim and Kopete conversations. Also in their logs
• In Firefox, Epiphany and Konqueror cache.
• In RSS feeds from Liferea, Blam or Akregator
• In Tomboy notes.
• In office suite files: OpenOffice.org (both old formats and OpenDocument), Microsoft Office, Abiword, RTF files, PDF
• Help files, like Manual Pages, Monodoc, TextInfo, Windows Help (chm)
• In images (jpg, png, bmp, tiff, gif).
• In audio files: mp3, ogg, flac.
• Video files.
• In your application launchers.

The list doesn’t end there, but I won’t name them all, see for yourselves. You can even create your own filters.

Beagle runs a daemon (beagled), which is responsible for indexing our data. By default, it indexes our home, but you can specify other paths (for example, if we have our music elsewhere), as well as prevent beagled from indexing certain directories. And it does all this in such a way that it doesn’t affect the user’s activity on the computer, although we can tell it to index as quickly as possible (for example, when we’re not going to use the PC).

We also have the possibility to create static indexes. For example, we can create a static index of the content of a remote directory on our local network, or some place that doesn’t change very often, and therefore doesn’t need to be re-indexed. This static index (the result is a directory) can be shared with other users.

To search we have two alternatives:

• The first is the graphical interface: beagle-search

  

• The console command beagle-query

This great utility runs on Mono. It’s impressive the amount of software that is starting to be developed under this platform: F-Spot, Banshee, Tomboy, MonoDevelop, NAnt, iFolder… just to name a few.