The Mount Menu  The Mount Menu   Menu Sections  Menu Sections   The Options menu  The Options menu

The Tools menu

What is a Tool? An outside program that is called from 4Pane, and the results displayed by 4Pane. There are three of these built-in, but you can add more yourself.

The first three menu-items are for the standard tools: Locate, Find and Grep. Selecting one of these invokes the appropriate dialog, and the results are displayed in the Terminal Emulator.

Locate is the quickest way of searching for a file or directory, as it looks up a database rather than each search scanning the filesystem. If it isn't already available on your system, install the 'findutils' package. Its search pattern can contain the simple wildcards *, ? and [Aa] (but see the -r option below).
The Locate dialog is quite simple; most often you'll just put the search string in the box and click OK. It keeps a history of the searches that you can access from the dropdown arrow or the Down/Up keys. There are also options that may occasionally be useful:


The Find and Grep dialogs definitely aren't simple; in fact they are too complicated to describe in detail here. Instead I've made them as self-describing as possible. Both split the numerous available options into several pages, and most options have a detailed tooltip.

For Find you will almost certainly want, as a minimum, to select from the Path and the Name pages; for Grep the File Options, Pattern and Location pages. As you will see, selections made on a page aren't added to the command until the Add to Command String button is clicked.
Most items that require you to provide a name e.g. the Find path, have a history. The final command also has a history, so you can alter and repeat one of the previous commands. You can also do this from the Terminal Emulator's history.

The output of these commands are a list of files displayed in the Terminal Emulator, and you'll often want to open one or more of them. You can, by:
Next a single item, Launch Terminal (Ctrl-T). This does just what is says: it opens a new console window, which will use the current selection as its path. You can configure which console application is opened (konsole, gnome-terminal etc) in Options > Configure 4Pane > Terminals.

The rest of the menu deals with user-defined tools: programs or scripts that you have chosen yourself (from the Options > Configure 4Pane); more about these here.
Run a Program opens a submenu from which you can select one of these tools. Once you've run one of them, the last command, Repeat Previous Program, allows you easily to repeat it.