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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
     /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate  Script 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
     /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate script.  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
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