Best practices for navigating file structure via terminal?

Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 191 points –

I've just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.

I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I've learned a ton but one thing I can't seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I'm SSH'd to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I'm missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y'all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?

I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.

I'd love to hear any tips or tricks!

EDIT: I've been using Termius because they have a great Android client, but I wasn't about to pay $5/mo for sync. Especially to sync to someone else's cloud. Which led me to Tabby, which I understand has quite a large footprint resource-wise. But I guess I either don't know enough yet to be mad about it or it hasn't impacted any of my systems negatively yet. No Android client though, but you can bring your own sync solution and it has a handy little shortcut to SFTP to the current directory you're in. Between that and stuff like ranger, it's made it so much easier to learn my way around!

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I use ls and ranger, to find files i use find -name and remember that * is used as a wildcard so you can use it when searching for stuff with in incomplete filename or when copying or moving files/directories. You could also use colorls to add some flare to your ls, and oh-my-zsh for syntax highlighting and tab autocomplete

I know there is probably a historical reason but I hate how find parses its arguments.

Any other app would be fine --name or find -n.

Every time I use it I have to spend a few minutes checking the results to make sure that it's actually doing what I want it to do.

That's one of the reasons why the more modern fd is a nice alternative: it accepts command line args as you'd expect.

Also every other search program has the needle as a positional argument and either reserves a named parameter to specify haystack, or has the haystack come after.

Apparently the find devs thought users would spend more time using it as an alternative to ls -a than finding specific files

Depending on system, something like locate/mlocate might be installed, and is almost certainly available if the following seems like a good idea.

Tools/daemons like them are quicker for finding files - basically because they index all files except those in specified places. (Or potentially only those in specified places depending on tool/configuration.)

That way, rather than find -name 'some_wildcard_string', it's instead locate 'partial_filename_match or locate --regex 'some_regex_string'.

As for speed: locate / | wc -c returned 565035, the count of files currently indexed by mlocate on my computer, in 0.3 seconds. Quite a bit quicker than find! (locate / literally returns any file with a / in the full pathname, which basically means every single file in its DB).