Linux Multimedia Hacks

Find All Your Media Files

Use standard command-line tools to track down all of the media files scattered around your computer.

Even with all the great ID3 tagging tools and other programs, we have to organize our media files; sometimes they just get put in strange places. When your collection becomes so scattered that you can’t track down files you want, it’s time for some spring cleaning. This hack tells you how to track down all the media files on your system, no matter where they are hiding.

The Fast Way

The quickest way to locate your media files is with, well, the locate command. locate uses a database that stores information about where all the files are on a system. On most Linux systems, this database is updated nightly. The up side of locate is that you get information quickly because it searches the database instead of the filesystem. The down side is that the data is up to a day old, so any media files added to the system since the last database update won’t show up.

So, to locate all of the MP3 files on a system, type:

	$ locate -i *.mp3

The -i option tells locate to ignore case, so this will find all files that end in .MP3, .mp3, or even .Mp3. Of course, you might want to locate not only all your MP3 files, but also all your OGG Vorbis and WAV files. While you could do this with individual commands, locate supports regular expressions, so you can combine it all into a single command:

	$ locate -i -r '\.(mp3|ogg|wav)$'

Tip

You can use this same idea to track down all of the video ...