Visit Monkey!

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Searching for a free search program(Linux bash script) with GUI input controls? Want to see results on your browser? Love keyword highlighting? Need to see not just result fragments from file but the file itself? Want to restrict searches to ASCII/text files only but need to view list of files that weren't searched also? Want a clickable link for EVERY FILE with or without a match within the domain of the search? Want to see the progress of the search with an oscillating progress bar and a scrolling percentage-completed tailbox?

Welcome to MonkeyWordSearch! The Monkey's got it all for you!

Read on.

REQUIREMENTS

1.Zorin7 OS [Ubuntu] Linux
2.A modern browser that supports CSS3 transitions [I used Chrome28.0, Firefox28.0, Opera12.16]
3.Zenity [I used version 3.6.0]
4.GNU Awk 4.0.1
5.Rxvt v2.6.4
Screen resolution: 1280 x 800 [Recommended]

FEATURES

MonkeyWordSearch is a powerful recursive keyword search utility with GUI input box, file select control, file-type and maxdepth filters which let you search files on your Linux PC/Laptop for your search phrases. It's features are listed below.

You wouldn't believe it that a simple program such as MonkeyWordSearch needs so many Linux commands and tools to fetch you the results! First you need to manually verify or set 4 files at the top of the $HOME/tools/MonkeyWordSearch/Mws.bash script. Change samples below to suit your environment.

#Define your browser location below
BROWSER=/usr/bin/chrome
#Define awk location below
AWK=/usr/bin/awk
#Define rxvt location below
RXVT=/usr/bin/rxvt
#Define zenity location below
ZENITY=/usr/bin/zenity

Apart from these, there are 17 Linux commands/tools Monkey needs. You may appreciate the fact that Monkey automatically scans and sets the locations of these following essential Linux commands without you having to manually check each one of them. When you run Monkey, one of the first things it does is to check for these 17 files and error out if it misses anything. If MonkeyWordSearch doesn't start up, open the [$HOME/tools/MonkeyWordSearch/MwsMissing.out] file to view the details of found and not found files and fix the problems if any and re-run Monkey after fixing problems. Here's the list of these mostly standard and almost always available 17 Linux commands/tools:

mkdir bash mv rm touch echo grep cat sed find sleep file wc expr bc cp sort 

While leaving out non-text/ASCII files, Monkey also excludes text files bigger than 5MB from being searched but lists their names so you can search those big files manually if you choose to. You can change the default big file size by searching for and changing the line below in the Mws.bash script

if [ $fsize -le 5242880 ]; then

MonkeyWordSearch has made it easy for you to be safe when you click on files to open them from the browser by segregating non-text/ASCII files and excluding them from being searched. Again, even among text/ASCII files it picks out and excludes files bigger than 5MB from being searched. Best of all, MonkeyWordSearch presents you a  skipped(non-text) files page with non-clickable list of file names by default, but you can make it clickable by pressing the button just above the list. Talk about having the best of both worlds, safety and convenience! As a general rule of thumb, though, ALWAYS exercise caution when clicking on links because of the way browsers make file-associations. For example, don't click on executables, huge files etc.

Click on the link to the right of [Search Location] on the top of the main search result page to browse the search folder with your browser.

The result box shows a match but when you open the file and search for it you don't find it, what's going on? This may happen when you're searching html files where there could be matches found in non-content areas such as html code or javascript code. If you're opening the html search file with your browser, rightclick and select [view page source] and then press [CTRL-F] to do a search and you'll find it.

If the [ViewFile] link on the top-right of the search result box doesn't open the file, the filename possibly has some weird characters. Click inside the result box to open the results page on a new tab/window and click on the link on the top of the page to open the file. If this doesn't work either, at least we have the path and filename of this rogue! Just open it with your file manager.

Sometimes you may see results from zip files shown in the result box. This may be normal. If a html file is compressed into a zip file, it may be seen as "HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines" by the [file] command that is used to filter text/ascii files. In this case, the file may be opened by a text editor.

Let's say you just searched for files with the keyword [Linux] and want to save it for future. Just copy the [Mws.htm] file and rename it to something such as [Mws.linux.htm]. This will benefit especially those who keep their stuff well-organized on their PC/Laptop since they will have only one two places to search for anything! Isn't this a good idea?

1.Avoid searching system folders if you don't intend to.[Eg. /var, /usr, /etc etc.]
2.If you delete lots of files using PcManFM GUI file manager, then your [/root/.local/share/Trash] folder for root user or [$HOME/.local/share/Trash] folder for non-root users may be huge. Remember to avoid searching these if you don't intend to.
3.Your [$HOME/.thumbnails] folder may have tens of thousands of files, you may not want to search these.

CONCLUSION