I run Mylar on my Xubuntu server to manage my comic collection. I found out recently that there’s a tool that can convert the embedded .jpgs to .webp to save space, but it only works on cbz files and not cbr (zipped vs rar for those who don’t know). I wanted to convert all of my cbr to cbz so that I could run the tool on all my comics, so I needed to search hundreds of subdirectories for them and move them to the same folder to be processed.

Under Windows, I’d just type *.cbr into the search bar built into Explorer from the root comic directory, hit enter to get a list of files, select them all, and move them to the new folder. On Xubuntu, it’s nothing like as simple.

I found the search option in Thunar which opened Catfish, typed in *.cbr, and got a no files found message. After looking through the very limited options, I started searching for a way to do it. About thirty minutes later I’d found dozens of links telling me to use different, Terminal only, tools, but nothing about how to search subdirectories from the Catfish GUI. Purely by accident, I found a post from 2012 that mentioned the fact that Catfish doesn’t use wildcards, so just search with .cbr, something that’s not mentioned in the official docs.

I tried it, and it searched the subdirectories too, and found my files! Except there was no way to copy or cut and paste, just open, show in file manager, copy location, save as, or delete. No good options for almost 500 files across several dozen locations.

I ended up asking Chat GPT how to do it, and doing it through the Terminal, using this:

‘find . -type f -name “*.cbr” -exec mv {} /path/to/destination ;’

This is pretty basic functionality, and I had to resort to getting help to use the Terminal :(

  • @[email protected]
    9•1 year ago

    I’m sorry to see so many “Don’t expect Linux to work the same way” responses.

    Have you tried logging a bug requesting the functionality? It seems reasonable.

    I’d like you to consider another workflow, too - if you take the knowledge that you’ve gained about using find and -exec you might find that you don’t even need to move them all to one place to preprocess - you could probably find, convert to cbz, and run through the webp conversion all in-place. You could probably even use find ... | xargs and some trickery to do it in parallel quickly.

    It’s not unreasonable to expect bash skills on a server; it’s incredibly uncommon for servers to even have GUIs, and your use case probably hasn’t been considered by the developers.

    I would just mention ‘I want to select and copy/move multiple search results’ as the bug and ignore your specific context though. :)

    Edit:

    It’s the rather snappily named cbz_jpg-to-webp by azuravian and the Github page is here:

    https://github.com/azuravian/cbz_jpg-to-webp

    I’d suggest reading the docs though; it supports cbr and cbz.

    • TipponOPEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      I’m sorry to see so many “Don’t expect Linux to work the same way” responses.

      Thank you, it is a bit infuriating. There’s a definite feel of if you don’t like how something works, you’re not a part of the clique, and must be a Linux bashing noob.

      The reason for moving them was that I use Mylar. It processes comics and should automatically convert them to cbz and move them back to the correct directories. Part of the workflow should be that it tags them and updates the comic info too. I had some files that I’d put in place before turning that option on in Mylar, but it only converts files that it thinks are new, hence the move.

      I’d suggest reading the docs though; it supports cbr and cbz.

      Somewhere on a forum or another site, I’d read that the cbr support wasn’t working properly yet, but didn’t think to confirm it before trying to convert the files. I’ve been burned by comic converters in the past, so wanted to prep everything first. Lesson learned though :)