Locate

Locate is a command used in Unix and Unix-like operating systems to find files on a system. It is part of the mlocate package, which is a merge of the 'slocate' and 'locate' commands. The 'locate' command is faster than the 'find' command because it uses a previously built database, whereas 'find' searches in the real system, through all the actual directories and files.

Usage

The basic syntax of the 'locate' command is:

locate [option] pattern

Where 'option' can be any one of the options that the 'locate' command accepts, and 'pattern' is the name of the file or directory that you're looking for.

Options

Some of the most commonly used options in the 'locate' command are:

• -i: This option tells 'locate' to ignore case distinctions in both the pattern and the file names.
• -l, --limit, -n: This option limits the number of matches that 'locate' will return.
• -S: This option tells 'locate' to print statistics about each read database.

Examples

Here are some examples of how to use the 'locate' command:

• To find a file named 'example.txt', you would use: locate example.txt
• To find all files that include 'example' in their name, you would use: locate example
• To find all files that include 'example' in their name, ignoring case, you would use: locate -i example

See Also

• Find (Unix)
• Grep
• Regular expression
• Unix-like