Slocate and locate both do essentially the same thing: search a database containing the file names and locations on the system for a match and report all that are found. Both count on another program -- updatedb -- to do the heavy lifting by creating/maintaining the database to be searched. Slocate provides greater security by storing the permissions and ownership of each file, and then only showing the files that the user running the slocate request has permission to access.

The format of the locate/slocate is simple: locate options pattern. It's a good idea to be as specific as possible with the search pattern, because locate will list every file name it finds that contains a match. If I use locate to search my SUSE 9.3 desktop system for mono, like this:

locate mono

It responds with over 400 lines of output. But if I search for libmono instead of simply mono, locate returns only 3 matches.

If you're only interested in how many times the pattern is found, you can specify the -c option in your search, like this:

locate -c mono

File names in Linux are -- sometimes infuriatingly so users who are new to Unix -- case sensitive. Trying to remember if a file name is whereami, WhereamI, or WhereAmI before searching for it can add frustration to the task. Tell locate that you are an insensitive lout who is totally case insensitive by adding the -i option to the search, like this:

locate -i whereami

Updating the database

Since updatedb normally runs just once a day, sometimes you need to find a file that has been created since the last update. When that's the case, just enter the command updatedb as root and let it run. It may take several minutes to complete, or even longer if you have a large number of files to be accounted for.

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