Locate

From WikiMD's medical encyclopedia

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



Unix commands
File and directory management
* ls – list directory contents
  • cp – copy files and directories
  • mv – move (rename) files
  • rm – remove files or directories
  • mkdir – create directories
  • rmdir – remove empty directories
  • touch – change file timestamps
  • ln – create links
Text processing
* cat – concatenate and print files
  • grep – search text using patterns
  • sed – stream editor for filtering and transforming text
  • awk – pattern-directed scanning and processing language
  • sort – sort lines of text files
  • uniq – report or omit repeated lines
  • cut – remove sections from each line of files
  • paste – merge lines of files
  • join – join lines of two files on a common field
  • tr – translate or delete characters
System information and management
* ps – report a snapshot of the current processes
  • top – display Linux processes
  • kill – send a signal to a process
  • killall – kill processes by name
  • uptime – tell how long the system has been running
  • uname – print system information
  • df – report file system disk space usage
  • du – estimate file space usage
Networking
* ping – send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to network hosts
  • ftp – Internet file transfer program
  • ssh – OpenSSH SSH client (remote login program)
  • scp – secure copy (remote file copy program)
  • wget – retrieve files from the web
  • curl – transfer a URL
Miscellaneous
* echo – display a line of text
  • tee – read from standard input and write to standard output and files
  • xargs – build and execute command lines from standard input
  • env – run a program in a modified environment
  • tar – an archiving utility
  • gzip – compress or expand files
  • bzip2 – a block-sorting file compressor
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Contributors: Prab R. Tumpati, MD