Tuesday, June 28 2005 @ 05:27 AM EDT Contributed by: glosser
Linux.com continues their Command Line Interface series with a tutorial on the locate database.
Sometimes you need to find a file right now, and you don't want to search for it one directory after another. That's the time to visit the CLI and locate the missing file. 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. It's a good idea to be as specific as possible with the search pattern, because locate will list every file name it finds that contains a match.
