On 1/23/26 6:50 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
plocate (successor to mlocate, locate, etc...) builds a database of every file in your system, so that you can query it when you don't know where a file is in the tree.
I haven't gotten around to debugging why, when I type "locate foo", it will miss stuff I know is there. (I blame systemd, always seems a good first approximation.)
The primary advantage of all of these systems is that when something better comes along, re-indexing the files with the new system is *much easier* than trying to export and import all the data from one database to another. And, of course, they all get a free layer of cross-compatibility for dealing with the actual data - moves, name changes, copies, backups, deletions.
That is a very nice point. And the forensic value in being able to get at the real data in some stable form can be great. Trying to recover data from a database's underlying storage is not easy.
For me at the moment "locate" isn't working on my laptop, but I don't bother to fix it because *it* is not what is storing my files, so the fact it is broken isn't a great worry. I only lose a convenience not the data itself.
-kb _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
