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
     /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist  Job 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
     /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist job.  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