FastTraX  


Overview The Name Panel The File Panel The Date Panel

Overview

FastTraX is a simple utility to find files. It closely resembles the Find File tool on Windows.
FastTrax gives a number of edit controls to allow you to enter criteria for finding a file. These are separated into three panels described below.
When you click the  Find  button, FastTraX will search within the specified location, for files which match all the criteria you have specified. Edit boxes that are empty are ignored.
If you require more flexibility than this, please look at
TraX.

The Name Panel

When FastTraX opens, it starts in the Name Panel.
This panel allows you to specify

Where to search
There is a PopUp menu on the Name panel labeled Find in:
If you open FastTrax by dragging a folder onto its icon, or by using the "Open With" menu in Tracker, then this Popup will start with the selected folder. Otherwise it will start with the 'root' directory, "/".
Selecting this menu will bring up a list of folders to choose from, or you can choose your own.
At the top of the menu is the root folder, and all your mounted disks. If the only disk you have mounted is your main BeOS disk, then this will be labeled "/boot/" and no other disks will be visible. If you have any other mounted disks (of any filesystem type) they will also be visible.
Below the disks are a number of important folders: Below this is the "other..." option. Selecting this will bring up an Open window to allow you to select any other folder you wish.

What the file is named
The EditBox labeled Named: is where you can type in the name of the file you are looking for.
This field uses
globs, thus to seach for all gif images you could put *.gif into this box.
To search for all files containing "be" in their name, try *be*
All names used are case-insensitive, thus *.txt is the same as *.TXT or *.TxT  (etc)
You can leave this field blank to find all matching files, regardless of name.

Include Sub-Directories
Leaved this box checked to have the search descend into subdirectories of the selected folder.
Uncheck it to search only at one level.


The File Panel

The File panel is where you can place restrictions on the size, type and contents of a file.
To access the File panel, click the File button at the top of the FastTraX window.
The fields on this panel are:
  • Containing Text where you can search for a file based on its contents.
  • Size at least , Size less than where you can place restrictions on the size of the files you wish to find.
  • Kind, allowing you to search for a Folder, Plain File or Symbolic Link.

Containing Text
In this Edit Box, you can type in some text that you wish to search for.
This must be plain text - the seach does not use globs or regular expressions.
Putting text in this field will also cause the search to be restricted to plain files only, as only these can contain text. (NB: The "Kind" popup will NOT change to indicate this, but so that the search will work correctly, the restriction will be added when you commence the search)

Size...
There are two Edit Boxes for entering a file size in. You can use either, or both.
Size at least: -  the minimum size of the file to find.
Size less than: -  the maximum size of the file to find.
As you can see, by placing the lower bound on the size in the top box, and the upper bound in the bottom box, you can specify that the files found are to fall within a given range of sizes.
eg The screenshot to the left shows how to search for a file that is between 50kB and 200kB in size.

Kind
The Kind PopUp allows you to specify the kind of filesystem entity you are looking for.
This must be one of File , Folder , Link or "Any"
You cannot search for Filetypes in this version of FastTraX.


The Date Panel

The Date Panel is where you can add criteria about the modification or creation date of files.
There are four edit boxes on this panel. All four use parsedate which is a function in the BeOS to convert a string into a date. parsedate understands a large number of formats. Some examples are:
  • today which will give you today at 0:00
  • today 3:15am which will give you today at 3:15
  • last saturday 15:34:11 (3:34 PM (and 11 seconds) on the preceding Saturday)
  • this monday (the coming monday, 0:00)
Note though, that parsedate has some problems with commas in the strings, so you are better leaving them out. If FastTraX cannot understand the date you enter, it will being up an alert to inform you.

As with the Size section of the File Panel, there are two edit boxes for the each for Modified and Created. This allows you to specify a range of times to search, thus if you know that you changed the file yesterday, you can enter

because "yesterday" will default to 0:00 yesterday, and "today" will default to 0:00 today.


See Also


Documentation Copyright (C) 1999, Tim Vernum.
Images Copyright (C) 1999, with the exception of the User and Developer Icons, Copyright Be Inc.
All rights reserved.

Tim Vernum      27th June 1999