MANAGING YOUR DATA in Font

Drawing Code-39 in Font MANAGING YOUR DATA

Note In Windows, you can use Windows Explorer to launch program executables by just browsing to their

locations within Program Files and double-clicking their .exe files. It s technically possible to run programs by using Nautilus to browse to their locations, but this is discouraged. One reason is that Ubuntu doesn t store all of its programs in one central folder, as Windows does. However, most programs that are used on a daily basis can be found in /usr/bin. If the program itself isn t stored in /usr/bin, the folder will contain a symbolic link (effectively, a shortcut) to the program s genuine location on the hard disk, which means it s usually possible to launch an application either by typing its name into the terminal or by pressing Alt+F2 and typing the name.

Using Nautilus you can use the List view to check file size and other information. By default, the file name, size, type, and date modified are shown for each file on the current folder. Nautilus selects which unit of measure (bytes, KB, MB, or GB) are most appropriate to display each file. In order to get an idea of which are the largest files and which are the smaller, you can click the Size column label to sort files by size. Click it again and the order is reversed. You ll see a little arrow head next to the column name. When the arrow head is pointing up, the largest file is at the top of the list; when it is pointing down, the smallest file will be displayed at the top. You can also display additional information for each of the files. To add a column to the view, simply select View Visible Columns inside Nautilus when the List View is selected. Just check the box next to the name of the column you want to see.

Although ostensibly simple, Nautilus is packed with features, and it can be a rewarding experience working through the menus to see what you can find. Here are a handful of the more useful Nautilus features that can help optimize workflow: Tabbed browsing: You might have used tabbed browsing with the Firefox web browser, enabling you to visit more than one site simultaneously. The same principle applies to tabbed browsing in Nautilus: pressing Ctrl+T opens a new tab, which appears at the top of the program window and enables you to browse to a different location in the file system. Files can be dragged and dropped between tabs just click and drag them to a different tab and tabs can be reordered by clicking and dragging them. Many tabs can be open at any one time, and the only practical limitation is the width of the program window. To close a tab, click its X button. Matched selection: Imagine you re working on a large project and have generated a great many files. However, lacking foresight, you failed to create a special project folder and mixed all the files in with others in your Documents folder. The project files have a unique characteristic: they all have the name of the project within them. But some filenames contain other text, and there are varying types of files among the collection (images, documents, and so forth). Nautilus s matched selection feature, available on the Edit menu (click Select Items Matching), provides a solution: it lets you select files based on key text within the filenames. With the example quoted previously, you could type the project name into the Pattern dialog box that appears, surrounded by the asterisk wildcard (that is, *projectname*), which indicates that any number of characters can appear before or after the keyword. After you click OK, any filenames matching the text will be automatically selected, and you can then click and drag them to a new location or perform any other operation on them.