[GTALUG] A find alternative: fselect

[Christopher Browne]

Having recently been at a database conference, somewhere along the line,
someone pointed out this tool, "fselect", which is basically what you get
if you take /usr/bin/find, and change it to have a command line that looks
like SQL rather than the odd-ish find arguments:

https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect

$ fselect path, size from ~/Downloads where size gt 30mb order by size desc
limit 25
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/flyway-commandline-4.0.3-linux-x64.tar.gz
 53991744
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/HP41C.pdf      53174535
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/Tai chi/WuDang sword.mp3       44784426
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/civic-manual-2019.PDF  42192497
/home/cbbrowne/Downloads/HP-41CXOwnersManualVol1.pdf    39603314

Hmm.  Looks like there's some crud I might want to get rid of, and a few
calculator manuals :-)

FYI, fselect is written in Rust, and has a goodly number of ("painfully
large number of") dependencies, quasi-self-managed via the Rust-oriented
dependency tool, Cargo.

The dependency description is pretty commendable; it is pretty decently
self-descriptive.  See:
https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect/blob/master/Cargo.toml

Using fselect to search for things is, I suppose, my experiment of the
month.  Will see how it grows on me.

The output is intended to be human readable moreso than machine readable.
(That said, how many of us still use /usr/bin/find to generate input for
cpio???)
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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