locate(1) BSD General Commands Manual locate(1)
NAME
locate -- find filenames quickly
SYNOPSIS
locate [-0Scims] [-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 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 only stored characters between 32 and 127. The cur-
rent implementation store any character 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
in 2 bytes.
The following options are available:
-0 Print pathnames separated by an ASCII NUL character (charac-
ter code 0) instead of default NL (newline, character code
10).
-S Print some statistics about the database and exit.
-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.
The option database may be a colon-separated list of data-
bases. A single colon is a reference to the default data-
base.
$ 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 data-
base.
-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
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist Job 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 typ-
ically only regenerated once a week by the
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist job. Use find(1) to
locate files that are of a more transitory nature.
The locate database is typically built by user ``nobody'' and the
locate.updatedb(8) utility skips directories which are not readable for
user ``nobody'', group ``nobody'', or world. For example, if your HOME
directory is not world-readable, none of your files are 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 if both architectures use the same integer size. So
on a FreeBSD/i386 machine (little endian), you can read a locate database
which was built on SunOS/sparc machine (big endian, net).
The locate utility does not recognize multibyte characters.
BSD August 17, 2006 BSD
Mac OS X 10.6 - Generated Thu Sep 17 20:08:01 CDT 2009