Re: [Sheflug] Finding files/directory's.

[Matt Fairtlough <nospam [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My tuppence: I was very pleased to find "locate" on my SuSE7.3
installation...

luckily, updatedb is in root's crontab and it runs every night so my
locatedb is fairly up-to-date; sometimes I run it on demand if I have a
lot of things to find quickly but I can wait for a while while updatedb
does its stuff.

To search for an exact match with locate, you can do

% locate "*/foo"

(_with_ the quote marks!) and that will do the trick.  The man pages
explain that.

Also locate is much faster than find as the index is pre-built.  I find
the syntax of find rather strange as well.

Matt.

On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 19:35, Chris J wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Oddly, some more recent distros (Mdk 9, RedHat 8) do not install locate
> > by default. Also, note that it builds an index
> > (/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db) which may get out of sync between updates,
> > so if you need to find a file or files before the update puts them in
> > the index, you would be better of using find.
> > 
> 
> Another point, just to expand on the update - even if locate /is/ 
> installed, the installation may not have put updatedb into root's crontab, 
> so the database would never update... :)
> 
> locate is also bad as if you know the exact name of a file and type "locate 
> foo", it'll return all files that contain foo somewhere within the file 
> name, including foo, foobar, barfoo, foobarfoo, and barfoobar. So it isn't 
> ideal. It's fine to try and find summat quicker, less ideal if you want to 
> script summat.
> 
> Chris...
> 
> -- 
> \ Chris Johnson           \ NP: - Crazyhouse - Butterfly
>  \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
>   \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
>    \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____
> 
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
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> 
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