Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Unix locate command

On Solaris it needs to be installed from GNU findutils. For linux alternative implementation is rlocate. There is also a secure version slocate - Security Enhanced version of the GNU Locate

locate [-d path | --database=path] [-e | --existing] [-i | --ignore-case ] [--version] [--help] pattern...

Locate provides a secure way to index and quickly search for files on your system. It uses index database to sped search but that means that it dependent of the currency of the database. This is a deficiency: you buy speed at the expense of currency. The index database to make searching much faster then find. \

Examples:

locate perl -- Locate file perl in the DB and Print the path.

locate -i perl -- Same search as above, case insensitive.

locate -q perl  -- Run in Quiet Mode.

locate -n 2 perl -- Limit the no. of results shown to 2 first.

locate -U locater -o locateDB -- Create index DB starting at locater and store the index file in locateDB.

In the above example the system would locate perl on the local machine.

Note: You may need to run the "updatedb" command to update the database in order to find the file you are searching for. This command should be ran from cron daily or several times a day.

RELATED COMMANDS

find
whereis
xargs

Old News ;-)

1995 Summary unix find and fastfind on SunOS and-or Solaris

Sun Managers did it again. Answered all three questions correctly in less
than 24 hours!
 

Kudos to Dr. Peter Watkins (peter@jrc.nl) for answering almost immediatly
with the correct answers. I'm going to use his summary (which is brief)
since I could do no better. Peter writes...
 

>Taking your questions in a completely random order;
>
> + For Solaris 2.x try the GNU version of 'find'. Currently
> at version 3.8 I think. This has the 'locate' function
> which replicates the fastfind feature.
> Try ugle.unit.no:/pub/gnu/find-3.8.tar.gz
 

Quite so. I grabbed a copy and it's a perfect solution for my solaris
machines that never came with a fast find. Gnu's Great!
 

> + I suspect that the reason for duplicate names is that
> updatedb is actually a script (try looking at it) which
> descends the filesystem structure. Consequently if you
> specify / and /fred then fred will get searched twice.
> If you look at the updatedb script you will see that
> certain directories can be included/excluded there. Try
> that instead.
 

Correct again. I was specifically specifying each partition when in
fact the script is smart enough to assume you want everything minus
a few obvious things that no one would want. This was creating
redundancy which accounts for files being reported twice.
 

> + Your problem of updatedb not working at all seems a bit
> odd. I suggest you first try;
> /usr/lib/find/updatedb / /usr /nat1 /nat2
> by hand without chucking the output. Possibly the 'find'
> command is not where updatedb expects - look at the
> updatedb script again.
 

And so I did. It almost immediatly blew up complaining about a lack
of /tmp space. I cheated by changing the script to use a tmp space
out on a data disk. Now it works like a champ. First time in years!
 

My thanks to Dr. Peter Watkins as well as the other 9 respondees who
wrote later. Most were not able to answer all three questions but
everyone had something interesting to share with me. To see what...
(or if you're one of the other 9 respondees and want to see your name
in print)... credits and micro-summaries below...
 

-drp

Linux.com CLI Magic locate, slocate, and rlocate

Sometimes you need to find a file that was present in the filesystem for a long time (for example some unix command). In this case you can use locate instead of find. Or slocate it, depending on your distribution. There is just one problem with using locate or slocate, and that's staying up to date. Here's how they work and how to use them, and a brief tease on rlocate,their nimble, more timely, heir apparent.

Slocate and locate both do essentially the same thing: search a database containing the file names and locations on the system for a match and report all that are found. Both count on another program -- updatedb -- to do the heavy lifting by creating/maintaining the database to be searched. Slocate provides greater security by storing the permissions and ownership of each file, and then only showing the files that the user running the slocate request has permission to access.

The format of the locate/slocate is simple: locate options pattern.

If you're only interested in how many times the pattern is found, you can specify the -c option in your search, like this:

locate -c mono

To search case insensitive use the -i option:

locate -i whereami

Since updatedb normally runs just once a day, sometimes you need to find a file that has been created since the last update. When that's the case, just enter the command updatedb as root and let it run. It may take several minutes to complete, or even longer if you have a large number of files to be accounted for. To find out how large your database is, enter the locate -S, like this:

warthawg@linux:~> locate -S
Database /var/lib/locatedb is in the LOCATE02 format.
Locate database size: 3411612 bytes
Filenames: 401444 with a cumulative length of 20196439 bytes
        of which 38656 contain whitespace,
        0 contain newline characters,
        and 43 contain characters with the high bit set.
Compression ratio 83.11%

Having to run the database update program before doing a search in order to have access to the latest files on your system is far from being an elegant solution. Some people just don't want to wait. If that describes you, then you might want to check out a new project called rlocate by Rasto Levrinc. It's based on slocate but with nearly real-time search capabilities. rlocate -- currently available in a beta release -- requires a Linux kernel at 2.6 or later. It functions as a kernel module which maintain a daily database containing the files and directories created since the last time updatedb was run.

When slocate is executed, both the daily database of new files maintained by the rlocate kernel module and the nightly database of all files are searched. The result is a search that yields results no more than 2 seconds old.

Reference

slocate [-qi] [-d ] [--database=]

locate project

slocate -u