To search for files by name without having to actually scan the
directories on the disk (which can be slow), you can use the
locate program. For each shell pattern you give it,
locate searches one or more databases of file names and
displays the file names that contain the pattern. See Shell Pattern Matching, for details about shell patterns.
If a pattern is a plain string – it contains no
locate displays all file names in the database
that contain that string. If a pattern contains
locate only displays file names that match the
pattern exactly. As a result, patterns that contain metacharacters
should usually begin with a ‘*’, and will most often end with one
as well. The exceptions are patterns that are intended to explicitly
match the beginning or end of a file name.
If you only want
locate to match against the last component of
the file names (the “base name” of the files) you can use the
‘--basename’ option. The opposite behaviour is the default, but
can be selected explicitly by using the option ‘--wholename’.
is almost equivalent to
find directories -name pattern
where directories are the directories for which the file name
databases contain information. The differences are that the
locate information might be out of date, and that
handles wildcards in the pattern slightly differently than
(see Shell Pattern Matching).
The file name databases contain lists of files that were on the system when the databases were last updated. The system administrator can choose the file name of the default database, the frequency with which the databases are updated, and the directories for which they contain entries.
Here is how to select which file name databases
searches. The default is system-dependent. At the time this document
was generated, the default was /usr/local/var/locatedb.
LOCATE_PATHto set the list of database files to search. The option overrides the environment variable if both are used.
locate can read file name databases generated by the
slocate package. However, these generally contain a list of
all the files on the system, and so when using this database,
locate will produce output only for files which are accessible
to you. See Invoking locate, for a description of the
‘--existing’ option which is used to do this.
updatedb program can also generate database in a format
slocate. See Invoking updatedb, for a
description of its ‘--dbformat’ and ‘--output’ options.