Locate (Unix)

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This article is about the Unix utility. For a definition of the word "locate", see the Wiktionary entry locate.

locate, a Unix utility first created in 1983,^[1] serves to find files on filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt database of files generated by updatedb or by a daemon and compressed using incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than find, but requires regular updating of the database. This sacrifices overall efficiency (because of the regular interrogation of filesystems even when no user needs information) and absolute accuracy (since the database does not update in real time) for significant speed improvements (particularly on very large filesystems).

The GNU version forms a part of GNU Findutils.

Some versions can also index network filesystems.

References

↑ Ref: Usenix ;login:, Vol 8, No 1, February/March, 1983, p. 8.

External links

locate(1) – FreeBSD General Commands Manual
GNU Findutils

Variants:

slocate (Secure Locate) at the Wayback Machine (archived February 4, 2009)
- locate(1): slocate – Linux General Commands Manual on linuxmanpages.com
mlocate - faster updates
- locate(1): mlocate – Linux User Commands Manual
rlocate - always up-to-date
KwickFind - KDE GUI frontend for locate
Locate32 for Windows Windows analog of GNU locate with GUI, released under GNU license

v t e Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir size split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pidof pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history id logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more paste sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs

Shell builtins	alias echo expr printf sleep test true and false unset wait yes

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal date lp lpr

List of Unix utilities

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