[PLUG] Locate v. find

Mike Connors mconnors1 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 29 15:51:09 UTC 2010


On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 6:38 AM, frankhunt <fh-linux at frankhunt.com> wrote:

> As usual, especially in Linux, "it depends" . . .
>
> whereis: will search only particular paths to find binaries and or
> manpages.
>
> locate: locate uses a database created by updatedb to efficiently locate
> files. Works great, assuming your database is updated often enough.
> updatedb usually runs daily via cron but can be run manually from the
> command line.


FWIW - About a year ago I discovered 'MLOCATE'

"mlocate is a new locate implementation. The ‘m’ stands for “merging”:
updatedb reuses the existing database to avoid rereading most of the file
system, which makes updatedbfaster and does not trash the system caches as
much."

And there's also 'SLOCATE'

"Secure Locate provides a secure way to index and quickly search  for
files on your system. It uses incremental encoding just like GNU
locate To compress its database to make searching faster,  but "it
will  also store  file  permissions and ownership so that users will
not see files they do not have access to."



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