LOCATE(1) | General Commands Manual | LOCATE(1) |
locate
— find
filenames quickly
locate |
[-bciS ] [-d
database] [-l
limit] pattern ... |
The locate
utility searches a database for
all pathnames which match the specified pattern. The
database is recomputed periodically (usually weekly or daily), and contains
the pathnames of all files which are publicly accessible.
Shell globbing and quoting characters
(‘*
’,
‘?
’,
‘\
’,
‘[
’, and
‘]
’) may be used in
pattern, although they will have to be escaped from
the shell. Preceding any character with a backslash
(‘\
’) eliminates any special meaning
which it may have. The matching differs in that no characters must be
matched explicitly, including slashes
(‘/
’).
As a special case, a pattern containing no globbing characters (“foo”) is matched as though it were “*foo*”.
Historically, locate
stores only
characters between 32 and 127. The current implementation stores all
characters except newline (‘\n
’) and
NUL (‘\0
’). The 8-bit character
support does not waste extra space for plain ASCII file names. Characters
less than 32 or greater than 127 are stored as 2 bytes.
The options are as follows:
-b
-c
-d
database-d
options are allowed. Each
additional -d
option adds the specified database
to the list of databases to be searched.
database may be a colon-separated list of databases. An empty database name is a reference to the default database.
$ locate -d $HOME/lib/mydb:
foo
will first search for the string “foo” in $HOME/lib/mydb and then in /var/db/locate.database.
$ locate -d
$HOME/lib/mydb::/cdrom/locate.database foo
will first search for the string “foo” in $HOME/lib/mydb and then in /var/db/locate.database and then in /cdrom/locate.database.
$ locate -d db1 -d db2 -d db3
pattern
is the same as
$ locate -d db1:db2:db3
pattern
or
$ locate -d db1:db2 -d db3
pattern
-i
-l
limit-S
LOCATE_PATH
-d
option was specified.find(1), fnmatch(3), locate.updatedb(8), weekly(8)
Woods, James A., Finding Files Fast, ;login, 8:1, pp. 8-10, 1983.
The locate
command appeared in
4.4BSD.
locate
may fail to list some files that
are present, or may list files that have been removed from the system. This
is because locate
only reports files that are
present in a periodically reconstructed database (typically rebuilt once a
week by the weekly(8)
script). Use find(1) to locate
files that are of a more transitory nature.
The locate
database is built by
user “nobody” using
find(1). This will skip
directories which are not readable by user “nobody”, group
“nobody”, or the world. E.g., if your home directory is not
world-readable, your files will
not appear in the
database.
The locate
database is not byte order
independent. It is not possible to share the databases between machines with
different byte order. The current locate
implementation understands databases in host byte order or network byte
order. So a little-endian machine can't understand a locate database which
was built on a big-endian machine.
October 23, 2015 | OpenBSD-6.4 |