locate (Unix)

locate is a Unix utility which serves to find files on filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt database of files generated by the updatedb command or by a daemon and compressed using incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than find, but requires regular updating of the database. This sacrifices overall efficiency (because of the regular interrogation of filesystems even when no user needs information) and absolute accuracy (since the database does not update in real time) for significant speed improvements, particularly on very large filesystems.

locate was first created in 1982.^[1] The BSD and GNU Findutils versions derive from the original implementation.^[2] Their primary database is world-readable, so the index is built as an unprivileged user.

mlocate (Merging Locate) and the earlier slocate (Secure Locate) use a restricted-access database, only showing filenames accessible to the user.^[3]^[4]

References

↑ Woods, James A. (1983-01-15). "Finding Files Fast". ;login:. Vol. 8 no. 1. Usenix. pp. 8–10. Retrieved 2016-03-27.
↑ "Finding Files". GNU. Free Software Foundation. 2012-11-17. Retrieved 2016-03-27. GNU locate and its associated utilities were originally written by James Woods, with enhancements by David MacKenzie.
↑ Miloslav Trmač (2005). "mlocate". Archived from the original on 2006-04-11. Retrieved 2016-03-27. ...faster and does not trash the system caches as much...attempts to be compatible to GNU locate, when it does not conflict with slocate compatibility.
↑ Kevin Lindsay (1999). "Secure Locate". Archived from the original on 2005-05-07. Retrieved 2016-03-27. ...will also check file permissions and ownership so that users will not see files they do not have access to.

External links

GNU Findutils
mlocate
locate(1) – FreeBSD General Commands Manual
locate(1) – OpenBSD General Commands Manual

Variants:

rlocate - Variant using kernel module and daemon for continuous updates.
KwickFind - KDE GUI frontend for locate
Locate32 for Windows - GPL'ed graphical Windows variant

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix commands

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