Looking for an easier way to find files than the find command? Try using locate. In contrast to find's complexity, locate is the ultimate in simplicity. The command:
locate <string> searches an internal database and prints the pathnames of all files and directories that contain the given string in their names. You can narrow down the search by piping the output to grep. For example, the following finds all files containing the string "kde" that are in bin directories: locate kde | grep bin The strings don't have to be complete names; they can be partial strings, such as "gno" instead of spelling out "gnome". The -r option lets you use a regular expression (in quotes): locate -r 'gno*' One thing to be aware of is that locate is case-sensitive: Searching for HOWTO and for howto will give you different results. Rather than searching the disk each time, as find does, locate depends on the creation and maintenance of a database. Because it only has to search the database, not the disk, locate is faster than find. On the other hand, the results are only as current as the database. The locate database is generally updated daily by a cron job, but you can update it manually by running the command updatedb (usually as root). If you are adding new applications or deleting old files and you don't want to wait for the next day to have an up-to-date database, you might want to run it manually. -- விஷ்ணுராஜ். க Kanchi Linux User Group Rocks ! http://kanchilug.wordpress.com My Experiments In Linux are here http://gnutuxfollower.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
