plocate – much faster locate

plocate is a locate based on posting lists, completely replacing mlocate with a much faster (and smaller) index.

It is suitable as a default locate on your system.

plocate works by creating an inverted index over trigrams (combinations of three bytes) in the search strings, which allows it to rapidly narrow down the set of candidates to a very small list, instead of linearly scanning through every entry. It does nearly all I/O asynchronously using io_uring if available (Linux 5.1+), which reduces the impact of seek latency on systems without SSDs. Like mlocate and slocate, the returned file set is user-dependent, ie. a user will only see a file if find(1) would list it (all directories from the root have +rx permissions).

This is free and open source software.

Website: plocate.sesse.net
Support:
Developer: Steinar H. Gunderson
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

plocate is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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