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LOCATE(1)		     General Commands Manual		       LOCATE(1)

NAME
     locate -- find filenames quickly

SYNOPSIS
     locate [-Scims] [-l limit] [-d database] pattern ...

DESCRIPTION
     The  locate  program  searches a database for all pathnames which match the
     specified pattern.  The database is recomputed periodically (usually weekly
     or daily), and contains the pathnames of all files which are  publicly  ac-
     cessible.

     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 mean-
     ing  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 cur-
     rent 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 de-
		 fault behavior and is faster in most cases.

     -s 	 Use the stdio(3) library instead of mmap(2).

FILES
     /var/db/locate.database	      locate database
     /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb     Script to update the locate database
     /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate  Script that starts the database rebuild

ENVIRONMENT
     LOCATE_PATH  path to the locate database if set and not empty,  ignored  if
		  the -d option was specified.

SEE ALSO
     find(1), whereis(1), which(1), fnmatch(3), locate.updatedb(8)

     Woods, James A., "Finding Files Fast", ;login, 8:1, pp. 8-10, 1983.

BUGS
     The  locate  program  may	fail to list some files that are present, or may
     list files that have been removed from the system.  This is because  locate
     only  reports  files  that  are present in the database, which is typically
     only regenerated once a week by the /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate script.
     Use find(1) to locate files that are of a more transitory nature.

     The locate database was built by user "nobody".  find(1) skips directories,
     which are not readable for user "nobody", group "nobody", or  world.   E.g.
     if your HOME directory is not world-readable, all your files are not in the
     database.

     The  locate  database is not byte order independent.  It is not possible to
     share the databases between machines with different byte order.   The  cur-
     rent  locate implementation understand databases in host byte order or net-
     work byte order if both architectures use the same integer  size.	 So  you
     can  read on a FreeBSD/i386 machine (little endian) a locate database which
     was built on SunOS/sparc machine (big endian, net).

HISTORY
     The locate command first appeared in 4.4BSD.  Many new features were  added
     in FreeBSD 2.2.

FreeBSD 5.0			  June 6, 1993			       LOCATE(1)
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