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Shell globbing and quoting characters "( *", "amp;?", "\", "amp;[" and "amp;]") 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 current implementation stores 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:
| |
Print pathnames separated by an ASCII NUL character (character code 0) instead of default NL (newline, character code 10). | |
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Print some statistics about the database and exit. | |
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Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching file names. | |
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Search in
database
instead of the default file name database.
Multiple
The option 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 $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. | |
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Ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the database. | |
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Limit output to number of file names and exit. | |
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Use mmap(2) instead of the stdio(3) library. This is the default behavior and is faster in most cases. | |
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Use the stdio(3) library instead of mmap(2). | |
LOCATE_PATH | |
path to the locate database if set and not empty, ignored if the
| |
/var/db/locate.database | locate database |
/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb | Script to update the locate database |
/etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate | |
Script that starts the database rebuild | |
;login, pp. 8-10, Finding Files Fast, 8:1, 1983.
,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 current locate implementation understands databases in host byte order or network byte order if both architectures use the same integer size. So on a FreeBSD Ns /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.
LOCATE (1) | December 11, 2020 |
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