Running a command for all files whose name matches…

I found a stray image named “img_1234.jpg” on a laptop and wanted to see if I already had it on my server.

On my Mac I could use spotlight’s nifty “kind:image” filter along with quicklook. Macworld has a great article about advanced spotlight usage.

On Ubuntu, it’s almost as easy:

locate -i img_1234.jpg | xargs -d'\n' feh -F -d
  • The locate -i says “find img_1234.jpg without case sensitivity. Locate likes to separate filenames (that might have spaces) with a newline.
  • The xargs -d'\n' says “expect filenames that are are separated by newline
  • The feh -F -d tells feh, a great little image viewer, to reduce the image to fit to the screen and draw the filename.

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