Find your stuff with locate — First published in fullweb.io issue #11

find-stuff-with-locate-tips.md

Find your stuff with locate

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"