locate is a Unix utility which serves to find files on filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt database of files generated by the updatedb command or by a daemon and compressed using incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than find , but requires regular updating of the database.
What is difference between find and locate in Linux?
locate simply looks its database and reports the file location. find does not use a database, it traverses all the directories and their sub directories and looks for files matching the given criterion.
How does Linux find work?
Grep is a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters in a specified file. The text search pattern is called a regular expression. When it finds a match, it prints the line with the result. The grep command is handy when searching through large log files.
How do I use the locate command in terminal?
To use locate, open a terminal and type locate followed by the file name you are looking for. In this example, I’m searching for files that contain the word ‘sunny’ in their name. Locate can also tell you how many times a search keyword is matched in the database.
Is locate faster than find Linux?
A locate command finds files faster because it searches a database instead of having to search the whole filesystem live. A dis-advantage is that the locate command cannot find any files added to the system since the previous time the database was created.
When to use find and locate?
Conclusion
- Use find to search for files based on name, type, time, size, ownership and permissions, in addition to some other useful options.
- Install and use Linux locate command to perform faster system-wide searches for files. It also allows you to filter out by name, case-sensitive, folder, and so on.
What does du command do in Linux?
The du command is a standard Linux/Unix command that allows a user to gain disk usage information quickly. It is best applied to specific directories and allows many variations for customizing the output to meet your needs.
Which Linux command is used to locate a file?
Sure. The locate command is used to find files by their filename. The locate command is lightning fast because there is a background process that runs on your system that continuously finds new files and stores them in a database.
How do I locate a file in Linux?
Basic Examples
- find . – name thisfile.txt. If you need to know how to find a file in Linux called thisfile. …
- find /home -name *.jpg. Look for all . jpg files in the /home and directories below it.
- find . – type f -empty. Look for an empty file inside the current directory.
- find /home -user randomperson-mtime 6 -iname “.db”