Following on last week grep tips, let’s see how to use locate
to search for files on your Linux machine.
The locate
command is faster than find
because it uses a database, whereas find
will scan the file system every time.
locate
uses a database, you first need to build it with:
$ sudo updatedb
Search recursively into a folder:
$ locate pattern folder/
If no folder specified search is system-wide, ex:
$ locate "*.py"
# Filter out error msg with -q
# (permission denied, etc)
locate -q "*.py"
Only count pattern occurrences:
$ locate -c pattern
Search is case sensitive use -i
to disable it:
$ locate -i "*.hTmL"