It's locate.updatedb
on Mac.
sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
For more information see the locate.updatedb man page.
see also :
updatedb
locate [OPTION]... PATTERN...
Step 2
To search for a file named exactly NAME (not *NAME*), use
locate -b ’\NAME’
Because \ is a globbing character, this disables the implicit replacement of NAME by *NAME*.
It's locate.updatedb
on Mac.
sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
For more information see the locate.updatedb man page.
I think the command you want is find
Do man find
to see the syntax and options
The locate command runs against a pre-built database of filenames
Use a simpler command
Generally, source for a project is likely to be in one place, perhaps in a few subdirectories nested no more than two or three deep, so you can use a (possibly) faster command such as
(cd /path/to/project; ls *.c */*.c */*/*.c)
Make use of project metadata
In a C project you'd typically have a Makefile. In other projects
you may have something similar. These can be a fast way to
extract a list of files (and their locations) write a script that
makes use of this information to locate files. I have a "sources"
script so that I can write commands like grep variable
$(sources programname)
.
Search fewer places, instead of find / …
use
find /path/to/project …
where possible. Simplify the
selection criteria as much as possible. Use pipelines to defer
some selection criteria if that is more efficient.
Ensure it is indexing the locations you are interested in. Read the man page and make use of whatever options are appropriate to your task.
-U <dir>
Create slocate database starting at path <dir>.
-d <path>
--database=<path> Specifies the path of databases to search in.
-l <level>
Security level. 0 turns security checks off. This will make
searchs faster. 1 turns security checks on. This is the
default.
Maybe you are searching because you have forgotten where something is or were not told. In the former case, write notes (documentation), in the latter, ask? Conventions, standards and consistency can help a lot.
The key to this answer is that mlocate allows the user to search several database files. If you take this into consideration, then having complex options for excluding or including files from certain paths depending on whether or not the filesystem is mounted becomes less important.
The provided example can be adopted to your situation with little
effort. Generally speaking, you can create several index files
with updatedb
and update them simultaneously or one
by one as frequently you want (via cron, for example).
If there is a global /etc/updatedb.conf, then it is probably wise to exclude paths that will have their own indexes, because otherwise you will get double results when searching all indexes as suggested in the example.
When all as many indexes as required have been created, proceed with a shell function such as shown below to automatically include all indexes when doing a search:
function locate { /usr/bin/locate \ -d /var/tmp/default.mlocate.db \ -d /my-stuff/mlocate-index2.db $@ }
(do a man updatedb
too)
man locate *scroll scroll scroll*
-d, --database DBPATH Replace the default database with DBPATH. DBPATH is a :-separated list of database file names. If more than one --database option is specified, the resulting path is a concatenation of the separate paths. An empty database file name is replaced by the default database. A database file name - refers to the standard input. Note that a database can be read from the standard input only once.
# updatedb -o /home/jaroslav/.locate/media-music.db -U /mnt/media/media/ \ -n images \ -n movies \ -n steamapps \ -n pr0n -v # locate -i glass -d /home/jaroslav/.locate/media-music.db| wc -l 35 # locate -i glass -d /home/jaroslav/.locate/media-music.db \ -d /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db | wc -l 363
locate "test.*"
doesn't return anything, but there are files named test in my system.
.
is treated as dot, not as in regex's as an
arbitrary character, so test.*
does not match
test
, but test.foo
.
locate "test*"
doesn't return anything, but there are files starting withtest
in my system.
locate stores the full path to the file, so to find
files starting with test, you should use locate
"*/test*"
.
The last point might be confusing, as locate foo
finds anything including foo
, so the pattern gets
interpreted as *foo*
. It seems that the pattern is
not enclosed in stars, if there is already one wildcard in the
pattern.
Disclaimer: I did some test and these are my conclusions, I cannot prove them by citing the man page, which seems very rudimentary.
locate uses a database to know which files are where. This database is normally updated nightly as a cron job.
You can manually update it with updatedb
You can just create database in home with -o
argument of updatedb
:
updatedb -o ~/.locate.db
And use it with slocate
like this:
slocate --database=~/.locate.db <pattern>
You probably want to define an alias for slocate
--database=~/.locate.db
.
You can use updatedb to have it parse the removable media paths, just configure accordingly the PRUNEPATHS and PRUNEFS environment variables in /etc/updatedb.conf or equivalent. Although this will only remember the path so if you mount in the same directory a different media and have updatedb run, it'll overwrite (or append?) the files.
You can workaround this by mounting each of your CDs to be catalogued in its own directory, not very hard, but a bit of a nuisance.
In updatedb.conf, uncomment the PRUNENAMES line and add the extension .pyc. On my Ubuntu system by default it reads:
# PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn"
Change it to
PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn .pyc"
Store the result of locate
in a variable, check to
see if it has any value, and then view that.
f=`locate ...`
[ "$f" ] && ls -al "$f"
The reason you can't get this information from
locate
directly is because it's not in the database
that locate
uses.
The cache for locate is updated by updatedb
. On most
distributions, it's run by cron
every day or week.
After huge changes, you can run it manually, too.
How about:
ls -td $(locate something)
or
ls -td1 $(locate something)
As @DanD explainedin his comment, /etc/updatedb.conf
contains settings for what paths and file systems to prune (not
index). Indeed I found my mount point among those paths, and upon
removing it everything worked fine.
locate reads one or more databases prepared by updatedb(8) and writes file names matching at least one of the PATTERNs to standard output, one per line.
If --regex is not specified, PATTERNs can contain globbing characters. If any PATTERN contains no globbing characters, locate behaves as if the pattern were *PATTERN*.
By default, locate does not check whether files found in database still exist (but it does require all parent directories to exist if the database was built with --require-visibility no). locate can never report files created after the most recent update of the relevant database.
-b, --basename
Match only the base name against the specified patterns. This is the opposite of --wholename.
-c, --count
Instead of writing file names on standard output, write the number of matching entries only.
-d, --database DBPATH
Replace the default database with DBPATH. DBPATH is a :-separated list of database file names. If more than one --database option is specified, the resulting path is a concatenation of the separate paths.
An empty database file name is replaced by the default database. A database file name - refers to the standard input. Note that a database can be read from the standard input only once.
-e, --existing
Print only entries that refer to files existing at the time locate is run.
-L, --follow
When checking whether files exist (if the --existing option is specified), follow trailing symbolic links. This causes broken symbolic links to be omitted from the output.
This is the default behavior. The opposite can be specified using --nofollow.
-h, --help
Write a summary of the available options to standard output and exit successfully.
-i, --ignore-case
Ignore case distinctions when matching patterns.
-l, --limit, -n LIMIT
Exit successfully after finding LIMIT entries. If the --count option is specified, the resulting count is also limited to LIMIT.
-m, --mmap
Ignored, for compatibility with BSD and GNU locate.
-P, --nofollow, -H
When checking whether files exist (if the --existing option is specified), do not follow trailing symbolic links. This causes broken symbolic links to be reported like other files.
This is the opposite of --follow.
-0, --null
Separate the entries on output using the ASCII NUL character instead of writing each entry on a separate line. This option is designed for interoperability with the --null option of GNU xargs(1).
-S, --statistics
Write statistics about each read database to standard output instead of searching for files and exit successfully.
-q, --quiet
Write no messages about errors encountered while reading and processing databases.
-r, --regexp REGEXP
Search for a basic regexp REGEXP. No PATTERNs are allowed if this option is used, but this option can be specified multiple times.
--regex
Interpret all PATTERNs as extended regexps.
-s, --stdio
Ignored, for compatibility with BSD and GNU locate.
-V, --version
Write information about the version and license of locate on standard output and exit successfully.
-w, --wholename
Match only the whole path name against the specified patterns.
This is the default behavior. The opposite can be specified using --basename.
LOCATE_PATH
Path to additional databases, added after the default database or the databases specified using the --database option.
locate exits with status 0 if any match was found or if locate was invoked with one of the --limit 0, --help, --statistics or --version options. If no match was found or a fatal error was encountered, locate exits with status 1.
Errors encountered while reading a database are not fatal, search continues in other specified databases, if any.
/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db
The database searched by default.
The order in which the requested databases are processed is unspecified, which allows locate to reorder the database path for security reasons.
locate attempts to be compatible to slocate (without the options used for creating databases) and GNU locate, in that order. This is the reason for the impractical default --follow option and for the confusing set of --regex and --regexp options.
The short spelling of the -r option is incompatible to GNU locate, where it corresponds to the --regex option. Use the long option names to avoid confusion.
The LOCATE_PATH environment variable replaces the default database in BSD and GNU locate, but it is added to other databases in this implementation and slocate.
Miloslav Trmac <mitr[:at:]redhat[:dot:]com>