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LOCATE(1)              DragonFly General Commands Manual             LOCATE(1)

NAME
     locate - find filenames quickly

SYNOPSIS
     locate [-Scims] [-l limit] [-d database] pattern ...

DESCRIPTION
     The locate program 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 only stored characters between 32 and 127.  The
     current implementation store any character except newline (`\n') and NUL
     (`\0').  The 8-bit character support doesn't waste extra space for plain
     ASCII file names.  Characters less than 32 or greater than 127 are stored
     in 2 bytes.

     The following options are available:

     -S          Print some statistic about the database and exit.

     -c          Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching
                 file names.

     -d database
                 Search in database instead the default file name database.
                 Multiple -d options are allowed.  Each additional -d option
                 adds the specified database to the list of databases to be
                 searched.

                 The option database may be a colon-separated list of
                 databases.  A single colon is a reference to the default
                 database.

                 $ locate -d $HOME/lib/mydb: foo

                 will first search 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 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".

                 If - is given as the database name, standard input will be
                 read instead.  For example, you can compress your database
                 and use:

                 $ zcat database.gz | locate -d - pattern

                 This might be useful on machines with a fast CPU and little
                 RAM and slow I/O. Note: you can only use one pattern for
                 stdin.

     -i          Ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the
                 database.

     -l number   Limit output to number of file names and exit.

     -m          Use mmap(2) instead of the stdio(3) library.  This is the
                 default behavior and is faster in most cases.

     -s          Use the stdio(3) library instead of mmap(2).

ENVIRONMENT
     LOCATE_PATH  path to the locate database if set and not empty, ignored if
                  the -d option was specified.

FILES
     /var/db/locate.database          locate database
     /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb     Script to update the locate database
     /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate  Script that starts the database rebuild

SEE ALSO
     find(1), whereis(1), which(1), fnmatch(3), locate.updatedb(8)

     Woods, James A., "Finding Files Fast", ;login, 8:1, pp. 8-10, 1983.

HISTORY
     The locate command first appeared in 4.4BSD.  Many new features were
     added in FreeBSD 2.2.

BUGS
     The locate program 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 the database, which is
     typically only regenerated once a week by the
     /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate script.  Use find(1) to locate files that
     are of a more transitory nature.

     The locate database was built by user "nobody".  find(1) skips
     directories, which are not readable for user "nobody", group "nobody", or
     world.  E.g. if your HOME directory is not world-readable, all your files
     are not 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 understand databases in host byte order or
     network byte order if both architectures use the same integer size.  So
     you can read on a DragonFly/x86_64 machine (little endian) a locate
     database which was built on SunOS/sparc machine (big endian, net).

DragonFly 5.9-DEVELOPMENT        June 6, 1993        DragonFly 5.9-DEVELOPMENT