Searching on the BeOS

To go with last week's Tip about Searching the Be Web Site, this week some cool tricks to using the search features of the BeOS itself, all of them new in Release 3.

In Release 3, the BeOS Find panel has numerous improvments. Two very useful refinements appear when you check the More options checkbox:

First of all, you can now name your queries in advance. This name will be used for the results window, and will be the name of the query file saved in your /home/queries directory. No need to rename a query in the Tracker later. Second, you can now have your search look in the Trash as well as on the rest of your disk.

Much more interestingly, you can now switch from by Name or by Attribute to the by Formula mode, and have the query you've built in the other modes appear in its naked glory in the BeOS file system query language:

This is a great learning tool, if you want to construct queries which are not possible using the other two methods, but find reading BeOS programming documentation (to learn the query language) too much trouble.

Finally, there's also now a command line query tool for executing queries on the command line. This tool can only use the formula method, so being able to learn the query language from the File panel is doubly useful! Just type "query" in Terminal for usage information.