LOCATE(1)               System General Commands Manual               LOCATE(1)

NAME
     locate - find filenames quickly

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

DESCRIPTION
     The locate utility 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 pub-
     licly 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 stores only characters between 32 and 127.  The cur-
     rent implementation stores all characters except newline (`\n') and NUL
     (`\0').  The 8-bit character support does not waste extra space for plain
     ASCII file names.  Characters less than 32 or greater than 127 are stored
     as 2 bytes.

     The options are as follows:

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

     -d database
             Search in database instead of 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.

             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 for the 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 for the 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, 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.  Usually faster in most cases.

     -S      Print some statistics about the database and exit.

     -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
     /usr/local/libexec/locate.updatedb  script to update the locate database
     /var/db/locate.database             locate database

SEE ALSO
     cron(1), crontab(1), find(1), fnmatch(3), locate.updatedb(8)

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

HISTORY
     The locate command appeared in 4.4BSD.

BUGS
     locate 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 a periodically reconstructed database
     (typically rebuilt once a week by the timed cron entry).  Use find(1) to
     locate files that are of a more transitory nature.

     The locate database is built whichever user does the weekly update using
     find(1).  This will skip directories which are not readable by the said
     user group or the world.  E.g., if your home directory is not world-read-
     able, your files will not appear 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 cur-
     rent locate implementation understands databases in host byte order or
     network byte order.  So a little-endian machine can't understand a locate
     database which was built on a big-endian machine.

BSD                             August 9, 2004                             BSD