I run Mylar on my Xubuntu server to manage my comic collection. I found out recently that there’s a tool that can convert the embedded .jpgs to .webp to save space, but it only works on cbz files and not cbr (zipped vs rar for those who don’t know). I wanted to convert all of my cbr to cbz so that I could run the tool on all my comics, so I needed to search hundreds of subdirectories for them and move them to the same folder to be processed.
Under Windows, I’d just type *.cbr into the search bar built into Explorer from the root comic directory, hit enter to get a list of files, select them all, and move them to the new folder. On Xubuntu, it’s nothing like as simple.
I found the search option in Thunar which opened Catfish, typed in *.cbr, and got a no files found message. After looking through the very limited options, I started searching for a way to do it. About thirty minutes later I’d found dozens of links telling me to use different, Terminal only, tools, but nothing about how to search subdirectories from the Catfish GUI. Purely by accident, I found a post from 2012 that mentioned the fact that Catfish doesn’t use wildcards, so just search with .cbr, something that’s not mentioned in the official docs.
I tried it, and it searched the subdirectories too, and found my files! Except there was no way to copy or cut and paste, just open, show in file manager, copy location, save as, or delete. No good options for almost 500 files across several dozen locations.
I ended up asking Chat GPT how to do it, and doing it through the Terminal, using this:
‘find . -type f -name “*.cbr” -exec mv {} /path/to/destination ;’
This is pretty basic functionality, and I had to resort to getting help to use the Terminal :(
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What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.
I knew there would be a way to do it through the terminal, but I was disappointed because what should be a simple file operation couldn’t be carried out with the file manager and search. It’s a very basic task, but I had to change the way I was working to do it. As I’ve said in my other replies, I’ve been running my media server for years, and switched my laptop to Mint full time about two years ago. I grew up on DOS, and am happy using the terminal, but didn’t like the fact that there was no way to do it through the GUI.
This is the sort of thing that newcomers to Linux are constantly complaining about, and I’ve had a thread full of replies basically saying hur dur, Linux is different, deal with it (not from you, just to clarify).
I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.
It’s not that it’s the easiest way, full stop - it’s the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.
You did say it in a supportive way, and thank you for that :)
You might be missing my point though. It’s not that it’s bad because it’s different, I think it’s bad because whether the terminal can perform more complex operations or not, the file manager should at least be able to perform the basics. This is something that Windows, Android, and as far as I can remember, MacOS can do.
When Linux users have to switch from the Windows Settings panel over to Control Panel to do something simple, they complain, as they rightly should. It’s a program that can’t carry out the tasks it was designed for. This is an equivalent problem. The file manager can’t carry out a task that other file managers can do easily.
I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol
I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you’re already working in a gui context, which let’s face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.
Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn’t do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you’re thinking about job at all, then I double down on the “stick to the console and get better at it,” because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)
That being said, you’re actually touching on the main reason we don’t have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we’ll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that “just works” for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they’re not gonna be much of anything if you ask me… anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn’t, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I’m having a pretty good week and I’m hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.
One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let’s face it, Gnome’s bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with “learn the terminal then noob lol”. You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.
I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won’t change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let’s see how far this implosion goes. It’s a very slow moving one.
Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don’t just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don’t tell my boss.
I totally understand that you are not statisified with the tools. We are welcome you to contribute to make it better. It is Linux after all.
Linux has a graphical file manager? How bizarre.
Shell commands are vastly more powerful than mouse actions.
It’s like the difference between being able to speak to someone using a shared language, versus only being able to point and grunt to get what you want.
The more you learn about using the shell, the more you’ll be able to do things very quickly and flexibly, without having to find an app that someone else has already written to do the precise thing you want.
Yes, shell commands are more powerful, but you shouldn’t need to learn a new language to do something as simple as waving hello to someone else.
What’s the point of a GUI file manager if it can’t handle very basic file operations?
Native speakers of the Unixish language (as it were) wouldn’t expect to use a mouse-clicky tool to do this sort of operation, because the shell is always there.
Don’t think of the shell as an exceptional tool that you should only use when other things fail. To develop fluency in the system you’ve chosen to learn, reach for shell commands first.
So your solution on Windows requires me to move all my files out of where they belong to process them? How do I get them all back when I’m done?
I knew how to write that find command. Didn’t need to search for anything. And because I know how to do that, I can also search for every pdf file modified since last month. I can spit out a list of the gps coordinates for every photo I’ve taken, ordered by latitude. I can find every Python script on my computer that uses Pandas. I can do a million things that boil down to “find every file that matches some complex filter and do something to it”, and I learned one tool. I don’t need to learn one point and click app that converts comics, one that messes with photo metadata, etc.
I can sympathize with the idea that there’s a high learning curve. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to provide ways for people to use their computer that require less knowledge. But recognize that you’re asking for a crutch here.
Some gui have more benefits that others, even some terminal commands are better to use than others, not really a Linux issue.
Sidenite, what’s this tool called that can convert the jpgs?
It’s the rather snappily named cbz_jpg-to-webp by azuravian and the Github page is here:
https://github.com/azuravian/cbz_jpg-to-webp
I haven’t used it at all yet, so I have no idea how well it works. As usual, test it out on a copy of your files first :)
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I don’t even know where to begin. First of all if you want Linux to be Windows you’re going to have a bad time, the sooner you accept that Linux is a different OS and does things differently, the sooner you might start to learn it. This is one of the most common mistakes, with people trying to download .exe to install things to people expecting every single tool to behave the same. Not to mention xfce is not the only DE and Thunar is not the only file explorer, unlike Windows you have options to choose if you’re not satisfied with a specific program, even file explorer.
Secondly that way is stupid even in windows, you’re destroying all of the organisation you had with no possible way of recovering it. How do you plan on putting the comics back into the folders they were on before you moved them all to a single folder?
Thirdly and perhaps the most important advice I can give you, don’t run random code you find on the internet, especially true for AI generated content.
How would I had done this? A quick search in Google for
convert cbz JPG to webpshowed me this script https://github.com/azuravian/cbz_jpg-to-webp/blob/main/cbz_JPG-to-WEBP.py which might be what you’re using, looking at the help of that script it seems it acts recursively on folders and subfolders and also works with CBR. Unfortunately for you you tried to use it the windows way and so we’re limited to whatever GUI is written for it. In fact most scripts would accept a parameter for the file to convert, so a small knowledge in terminal would allow you to do this for EVERY script.The terminal is not your enemy, you’re hampering yourself because you’re trying to do complex stuff in the GUI which is not capable of complex stuff.
Finally, you say the documentation of Thunar does not mention wildcards as a point in your favour of “this is confusing”, it’s not, when a documentation doesn’t mention something in general that something is not supported. If I had tried to use a proper regexp on windows finder I couldn’t point to the docs not mentioning it to say “it’s confusing that they don’t mention they don’t support regular expressions”. The reason Thunar doesn’t bother is that 99.999% of the time when a user searches
xwhat he means is really the regexp.*x.*, so that’s what it does, if you want something more advanced there are other tools for the job.I didn’t say at any point that I want Linux to behave like Windows, I just used Windows as an example of how easy it should be to use a GUI file manager to carry out very basic file operations. Why do people on this community sem to assume that just because I don’t like the way that something works that I don’t know how to do anything? It’s quite condescending.
Secondly that way is stupid even in windows, you’re destroying all of the organisation you had with no possible way of recovering it. How do you plan on putting the comics back into the folders they were on before you moved them all to a single folder?
No, I didn’t. My first sentence says that I run Mylar to manage the comics. I moved the files into Mylar’s watch folder so that it would pick them up and process them again. Since I added the cbr comics, I’ve turned on an option in Mylar that automatically converts new comics to cbz. While doing this, it renames them according to the name of the comic series, and adds metadata to the cbz file that is not in the cbr. While I probably could have found another way to do this, I already have Mylar up and running. Why would I make more work for myself when I have an existing tool that does it automatically and to my pre set preferences?
As far as running random code goes, I’d already found several examples of find being used to find files, and mv is a pretty straightforward command. While I could have put the string together myself with a little bit more searching, I tried Chat GPT to see if there was a GUI based way to do it. Not because I don’t like to use the terminal, but because I thought I must be missing something. Basic file operations are pretty much the whole point of file managers, so finding out that Thunar and Catfish couldn’t perform a basic task was a bit of a shock. It’s not a complex task for a GUI, and other OSes, and apparently other file managers according to some of the replies, can do this very easily.
The script you found is the one I will be using, but I haven’t done anything with it yet. I was doing what should have been basic maintenance on the files I wanted to convert. I did make a simple mistake, in that I read somewhere else that the script couldn’t handle cbr files, and didn’t double check before I started getting everything ready.
It was the Catfish documentation that doesn’t mention wildcards, and I didn’t think that was odd because wildcards are used pretty much everywhere, plus, the documentation didn’t cover very much.
The reason Thunar doesn’t bother is that 99.999% of the time when a user searches x what he means is really the regexp .x., so that’s what it does
That’s part of the problem. They know that wildcards are so commonplace that they assume that it’s what someone means. In itself it’s not a major problem, but a message saying something like ‘You searched for *.cbr, did you mean to search for .cbr?’ might have been more helpful than just a blank results screen.
First of all I owe you an apology, you don’t seem to be the type of person that usually writes posts like “This is why people don’t use Linux: it doesn’t do everything exactly the same as Windows”, and my response might have been overly harsh from past experiences.
I understand it wasn’t your intention to say that, but that’s quite literally what people understand when you say “I tried to do X the Windows way and it didn’t worked”. And this is kind of what people are trying to get you to see, it’s not that the file manager has or doesn’t have that feature (which BTW I would also expect it to work, and I checked on my computer and it does in fact work so I’m not sure why you couldn’t select things from the search result and drag it someplace else), the thing is that you went about this with the thought “this is how I would do it in Windows”, and refused to accept that people who use Linux would look at this in a different light, i.e. think about how to modify things in place instead on how to move everything to a single folder. In other words what you WANTED to do was
convert all images inside cbz and CBR files to webp, so instead of asking yourselfhow do I run this on all of these subfoldersyou askedhow do I move all of these files into a single folder, and that’s the Windows mentality creeping out, you shouldn’t need to move things around.Yes, Mylar will rearrange the things, but here’s the thing, if you had gone with the Linux mentality you would have learned how to run things in folders in place, which would have allowed you to convert the cbr to cbz in place, and then convert the images on those cbzs also in place, without needing to rely on the script supporting either CBR or recursion in the folders nor on Mylar to rearrange things. Also, just thinking about this, how would you have done it? Move CBR to black hole folder, then get them imported as cbz, then move all cbz to a different folder, then run the script, then move everything from that folder into the black hole folder and hope that Mylar doesn’t decide “I already have that comic, delete the one in the black hole since it’s lesser quality than what I already have stored”. Instead of just running the script in the terminal passing the root comic folder, do you REALLY think that your way is simpler?.
I understand the wildcards not working being confusing, and if you hadn’t mentioned that the documentation doesn’t mention it I would be in 100% agreement with you that it is confusing. My point is that the docs don’t need to mention features they don’t support, my counter example was regular expressions which are a lot more powerful than wildcards yet almost no search bar uses, and their documentation doesn’t mention it.
The message you suggested is a nice idea, if the search returns empty that would be a nice message that would direct people to the fact that it doesn’t support wildcards, I would encourage you to suggest it on the git repo or proper channel to the developers, or if you’re inclined to write code write it yourself and open a PR, this seems like a nice message that’s very informative and would improve the quality of the software.