Compared with their internet brethren, today's desktop search tools can be used not only to look for the names of files on your disk, but can also perform context-sensitive searches within email archives, images, videos and music.

Tools such as grep, find and awk have often come to the rescue of gleeful Bash-mongers searching for files buried beneath gigabytes of other items. But when a typical Linux distro takes up a couple of gigs of disk space, it's not hard to imagine that finding your files will only become trickier over time.

Global Regular Expression Print is the rather un-catchy full name of grep, the staple of any Linux users toolkit. It is a search tool run from the command line that is evolved directly from Unix, and is so useful it deserved a post of its own.

The GNOME Deskbar applet serves as a one-stop shop for all of your desktop searching needs. Deskbar manages this by using various plugins to interact with different Linux desktop search tools. But Deskbar isn’t limited to just a search tool.

Beagle is a free desktop search tool which is gaining popularity with several applications. You can search your desktop just as you search with google. It is possible to use beagle as a standalone search tool or integrate with applications such as firefox for easy desktop search. In fact, it is one application that any serious Linux user can not ignore

Recently things got better for Linux enthusiasts as Google released its Desktop search tool for Linux as a native build. Because I consider desktop search to be a very important must have feature in all operating systems, I decided to download the Google search tool for Linux and give it a run.

Being able to search your desktop is important. I frequently need to find that file that I know I have somewhere, but have no idea where I put it. Desktop search is a really neat solution, because it means you just start typing and it does the hard work of searching for you.

In part one, I looked at the Beagle search tool on the command line and the graphical user interface and in part two I want to look at alternative front-ends for it: Yabi, Catfish, and Peagle

There are search tools and then there are SEARCH TOOLS. Any Linux user that has ever needed real power for their searches generally has to resort to the command line. But what if you could have a GUI tool that could also handle regular expressions?