Relative to the other indexing service I mentioned previously, let’s just say that’s pretty darned fast. There’s no point in talking about lightning or blink-and-you-miss-it, because those aren’t suitable yardsticks. The speed difference is nominal as you can see. Let’s get it to do a check against those 7,539 files, too, to see if they truly exist and haven’t been deleted or renamed since last night: # time locate -e. That’s pretty swift, but it’s only reading from the overnight-run database. This time, we’ll output the list but time it and see the abbreviated results as follows: # time locate. gz on my machine, note the -c for “count”: # locate -c. Starting with a count, you can see there’s not quite a zillion but a fair number of files ending in. Let’s try a quick test with a file search that’s going to return a zillion results and use the time command to see how long it takes both with and without the -e option being enabled. It’s almost magical, that even on a slow machine, the mastery of the modern locate command allows us to query its file database and then check against the actual existence of many files in seemingly no time whatsoever. bashįor the curious, that -e switch means “existing.” And, in this case, you can use -e to ensure that any files returned by the locate command do actually exist at the time of the query on your filesystems. bashĪn option I like to use (if I remember to use it - because the locate command rarely needs to be queried twice thanks to its simple syntax) is the -e option. Our trusty friend locate can also play nicely with the –null option of xargs by outputting all of the results onto one line (without spaces which isn’t great if you want to read it yourself) by using the -0 switch like this: # locate -0.

You are probably also aware of xargs as well as the find command.

In the previous articles in this short series, we introduced the mlocate (or just locate) command, and then discussed some ways the updatedb tool can be used to help you find that one particular file in a thousand.

Linux find file by extension