Windows has the Search function to find files on your hard disk. But we all know that it is quite a PITA, and really slow (especially on XP), to search for the file. Linux too has a similar program to help you search for files stored on your system. It’s name is ‘locate’ and it is a command line utility available on every Linux system.
The simplest use of locate is:
You will get a list of all the locations where a filename has the expression we entered. Some of the options that you can use with locate are as follows:
- -b . Tells locate to search for basenames only. For e.g., the basename of /home/user/dir/test.txt is test.txt. This is useful when you do not want entire directories to be listed when the expression is a part of the directory name.
- -c . Print the count instead of names of files found.
- -i . Makes locate case-insensitive.
- -l LIMIT . Limits the number of results to LIMIT.
- -r . Tells locate that the expression supplied is a Regular Expression.
- -w . Tells locate to search for the whole name of a file, as opposed to the basename.
The above use is a very basic example. Most of the times, we need to also include the file types, which can also be included in the expression. But, I prefer using grep at such times. Here’s how:
You can further pipe the output to filter it to your liking. Locate uses a database to index files, and scans it to search for the files. To update the database, in case you have recently added a large folder and you want to search for a file in it, run the following command:
Advanced users can edit their crontab to automatically update their mlocate database by following these steps (The first command is optional. Ubuntu sets the default editor to nano, while I prefer vim):
Append the following lines to the crontab:
That’s it for today! Hope it becomes easier to search for things on your disk… :smile:
EDIT: The crontab addition is not necessary… There is an entry for updatedb in the system crontab by default, and it updates the database once in 24 hours.