Package: mlocate (0.26-3)

quickly find files on the filesystem based on their name

mlocate is a new implementation of locate, a tool to find files anywhere in the filesystem based on their name, using a fixed pattern or a regular expression. Unlike other tools like find(1), locate uses a previously created database to perform the search, allowing queries to execute much faster. This database is updated periodically from cron.

Several implementations of locate exist: the original implementation from GNU's findutils, slocate, and mlocate. The advantages of mlocate are:

 * it indexes all the filesystem, but results of a search will only
   include files that the user running locate has access to. It does
   this by updating the database as root, but making it unreadable for
   normal users, who can only access it via the locate binary. slocate
   does this as well, but not the original locate.

 * instead of re-reading all the contents of all directories each time
   the database is updated, mlocate keeps timestamp information in its
   database and can know if the contents of a directory changed without
   reading them again. This makes updates much faster and less demanding
   on the hard drive. This feature is only found in mlocate.

Installing mlocate will change the /usr/bin/locate binary to point to mlocate via the alternatives mechanism. After installation, you may wish to run /etc/cron.daily/mlocate by hand to create the database, otherwise mlocate won't work until that script is run from cron itself (since mlocate does not use the same database file as standard locate). Also, you may wish to remove the "locate" package in order not to have two different database files updated regularly on your system.

Tags: Implemented in: C, User Interface: Command Line, Role: role::program, scope::utility, Purpose: Searching

This page is also available in the following languages (How to set the default document language):