LKBEN10958: Howto search extremely quick under linux with locate

Symptom

You want to find files quickly

Cause

Find under Linux can be quite slow

Solution

You should install locate on your machine. With locate you can find files very quick. The trick is the use of a local database which is indexed from time to time. Please note that new files will not be found after the index has been generated again. You can use the updatedb command to generate the index.

locate <file to search>

To be even more efficient you use regular expressions to search in your result. e.g.

locate ip|grep sbin -> will find all files with ip in the name and with sbin in the result. The result of this search is:

/sbin/dhclient-script
/sbin/ip
/sbin/ip6tables
/sbin/ip6tables-restore
/sbin/ip6tables-save
/sbin/ipmaddr
/sbin/iptables
/sbin/iptables-restore
/sbin/iptables-save
/sbin/iptunnel
/sbin/plipconfig
/usr/sbin/ownership
/usr/sbin/vipw
 

About the Author

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux in different European countries and different European languages. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform where he is one of the most important contributors and the main developer.

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