Sombrero File Search
Find every file. Know when you can’t.
Native file search for Linux, by name, by content, boolean and inside documents. Live and index-free. When it could not look somewhere, it says so.
Free software, GPL-3.0-or-later. AppImage runs on any distro with nothing to install. Windows build coming.
A search that says “0 results” without looking is lying.
A folder that denied reading, a disk that was not mounted, a NAS that stopped answering, a typo in the path: every one of these used to look exactly like “the file is not there”.
Sombrero routes every loss of completeness through a single channel. The GUI status bar, the CLI, the JSON stream and the exit code all read from it, so a new kind of loss shows up everywhere at once.
$ sfs /mnt/backup -c invoice# incomplete: invalid location in /mnt/backup: path does not exist (disk unmounted? typo?)# results are INCOMPLETE — this is not 'nothing was found'$ echo $?2
One mechanical head, one process.
Built on, and for, a home server with a dozen mechanical disks, SMR drives on USB and network mounts that sometimes die. Roots are grouped by the physical disk behind them, and each disk class gets the thread pool it can actually use. Every number was measured on cold cache.
Same search over a 10-mount archive: a single process with 24 threads, against one process per disk.
| Disk / operation | 1 thread | 4 threads | Full pool (24) | Policy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
NVMe, name search (/usr, 92 680 hits) | 5.2 s | 1.5 s | 0.5 s | SSD: full pool |
| SMR 8 TB, name search (2.76 M inodes) | 35 s | 38 s | 39 s | Rotational, names: 1 thread |
| SMR 8 TB, content search (25 k files) | 36 s | 30 s | 29 s | Rotational, content: full pool |
Searches like Agent Ransack, native to Linux.
Glob or regex, plain text or regex, highlighted in the preview.
(note OR report) AND patient NOT draft, with parentheses and quoted phrases.
PDF, docx, odt, epub and zip, through a bundled ripgrep-all. No pandoc needed.
Thumbnails and an audio/video player right in the results.
Search tabs, saved searches, history, CSV/JSON export, light and dark theme.
Never moves or deletes. Checks free space, FAT32 limits and illegal names before writing.
Finds byte-identical groups and never deletes. Which copy goes is your call.
Same engine. --print0 for pipelines, --json for scripts, --nice-io for cron.
Find the copies eating your disks.
Point it at one folder or at every disk. It returns groups of byte-identical files, sorted by the space they waste, with the disk each copy lives on. Export the list to CSV or JSON and decide calmly.
Hard links are recognized as the same file, not as duplicates: reporting them would invite you to delete something that takes no extra space.
- Same file?Hard links are grouped first and counted once.
- Same size?Free: the size is already known. Unique sizes drop out.
- Same beginning?BLAKE2b of the first 64 KiB rules out most candidates without reading whole files.
- Same content.Full BLAKE2b only for the survivors, read one disk at a time so mechanical heads do not fight.
It searches. It does not manage your files.
Sombrero is not a file manager. It has no button to move, rename or delete anything, so a search can never cost you data.
Never moves or deletes
There is no move, rename or delete anywhere in the program. Decisions about your files stay in your file manager, with you.
Copies leave the original alone
Copying only creates new files. The source is never touched, and an existing file at the destination is skipped unless you choose to overwrite it.
Duplicates, shown, never removed
It finds byte-identical copies and lists them. Which one goes is your call, made somewhere else.
Pick your way in.
AppImage any distro
Nothing to install. Python, PySide6, rg, fd and rga are bundled.
chmod +x Sombrero_File_Search-*.AppImage ./Sombrero_File_Search-*.AppImage
.deb Debian · Ubuntu · Mint
Thin package. --setup-gui builds the GUI environment in your home.
sudo apt install ./sombrero-file-search_*_all.deb
From source no root
Installs into ~/.local. Works on immutable distros too.
git clone https://github.com/Thiopental1976/sombrero-file-search.git cd sombrero-file-search && ./install.sh
Windows Coming
A portable build is in testing: unzip and run, no administrator rights needed.
Full guide in the manual. No Flatpak on purpose: a tool that sweeps the whole disk does not belong in a sandbox.
Free on Linux, and it stays that way.
Sombrero File Search is free software, made by one developer. Donations pay for development time, the domain and the upkeep of the site and the program.