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.\" Copyright (c) 1995 Wolfram Schneider <wosch@FreeBSD.org>. Berlin.
.\" Copyright (c) 1990, 1993
.\" The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
.\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
.\" are met:
.\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
.\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
.\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
.\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
.\" must display the following acknowledgement:
.\" This product includes software developed by the University of
.\" California, Berkeley and its contributors.
.\" 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
.\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
.\" without specific prior written permission.
.\"
.\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
.\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
.\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
.\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
.\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
.\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
.\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
.\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
.\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
.\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
.\" SUCH DAMAGE.
.\"
.\" @(#)locate.1 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/6/93
.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd June 6, 1993
.Dt LOCATE 1
.Os BSD 4.4
.Sh NAME
.Nm locate
.Nd find filenames quickly
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op Fl Scims
.Op Fl l Ar limit
.Op Fl d Ar database
pattern ...
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm Locate
searches a database for all pathnames which match the specified
.Ar pattern .
The database is recomputed periodically (usually weekly or daily),
and contains the pathnames
of all files which are publicly accessible.
.Pp
Shell globbing and quoting characters (``*'', ``?'', ``\e'', ``[''
and ``]'')
may be used in
.Ar pattern ,
although they will have to be escaped from the shell.
Preceding any character with a backslash (``\e'') eliminates any special
meaning which it may have.
The matching differs in that no characters must be matched explicitly,
including slashes (``/'').
.Pp
As a special case, a pattern containing no globbing characters (``foo'')
is matched as though it were ``*foo*''.
Historically, locate store only characters between 32 and 127. The
current implementation store any character except newline ('\\n') and
NUL ('\\0'). The 8-bit character support don't wast extra space for
plain ASCII file names. Characters less than 32 or greather than 127
are stored in 2 bytes.
The following options are available:
.Bl -tag -width 10n indent
.It Fl S
Print some statistic about the database and exit.
.It Fl c
Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching file names.
.It Fl d Ar database
Search in
.Ar database
instead the default file name database.
Multiple
.Fl d
options are allowed. Each additional
.Fl d
option adds the specified database to the list
of databases to be searched.
.Ar 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 string ``foo'' in
.Pa $HOME/lib/mydb
and then in
.Pa /var/db/locate.database .
$ locate -d $HOME/lib/mydb::/cdrom/locate.database foo
will first search string ``foo'' in
.Pa $HOME/lib/mydb
and then in
.Pa /var/db/locate.database
and then in
.Pa /cdrom/locate.database .
``$ 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
.Ar -
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
.Ar one
pattern for stdin.
.It Fl i
Ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the database.
.It Fl l Ar number
Limit output to
.Ar number
of file names and exit.
.It Fl m
Use
.Xr mmap 2
instead of the
.Xr stdio 3
library. This is the default behavior. Usually faster in most cases.
.It Fl s
Use the
.Xr stdio 3
library instead of
.Xr mmap 2 .
.Sh FILES
.Bl -tag -width /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb -compact
.It Pa /var/db/locate.database
locate database
.It Pa /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
Script to update the locate database
.It Pa /etc/weekly
Script that usually starts the database rebuild
.El
.Sh ENVIRONMENT
.Bl -tag -width LOCATE_PATH -compact
.It Pa LOCATE_PATH
path to the locate database if set and not empty, ignored if the
.Fl d
option was specified.
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr find 1 ,
.Xr fnmatch 3 ,
.Xr locate.updatedb 8
.Rs
.%A Woods, James A.
.%D 1983
.%T "Finding Files Fast"
.%J ";login"
.%V 8:1
.%P pp. 8-10
.Re
.Sh BUGS
.Nm
may fail to list some files that are present, or may
to list files that have been removed from the system. This is because
locate only reports files that are present in the database, which is
typically only regenerated once a week by the
.Pa /etc/weekly
script. Use
.Xr find 1
to locate files that are of a more transitory nature.
.Nm
database was built by user
.Dq nobody .
.Xr find 1
skip directories,
which are not readable for user
.Dq nobody ,
group
.Dq nobody ,
or
world. E.g. if your HOME directory ist not world-readable, all your
files are
.Ar not
in the database.
The
.Nm
database is not byte order independ. It is not possible
to share the databases between machines with different byte order.
The current
.Nm
implementation understand databases in host byte order or
network byte order if both architectures use the same integer size.
So you can read on a FreeBSD/i386 machine
(little endian)
a locate database which was built on SunOS/sparc machine
(big endian, net).
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm locate
command appears in
.Bx 4.4 .
Many new features were
added in
.Fx 2.2 .
|
