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DESCRIPTION

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 current implementation store any character except newline (‘\n’) and NUL (‘\0’). The 8-bit character support doesn't 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:

-S

Print some statistic about the database and exit.

-c

Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching file names.

-d database

Search in database instead 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 databases. A single colon is a reference to the default database.

$ 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 database.

-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).