On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 04:47:12PM -0500, xsdg wrote: > On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 02:14:58PM -0400, Peter Cordes wrote: > > locate(1) is good. It can search the whole system quickly.
> locate doesn't actually search the system. When a user runs updatedb(1?), >a database is created of all files accessible to the user running the >command. The locate command searches through the database. On debian >systems, updatedb is run in cron.daily. Yes, that's _why_ it can _effectively_ search the whole system quickly. find takes a long time because it has to traverse the directory tree. Locate just has to read its file where it keeps a list of every filename on the system. This is a good thing, because sequential reads are a lot faster than seeks and reads to scattered locations. I don't know if findutils runs updatedb in its postinst script, but if not, then a newly installed system won't have locate working for the first day. After that, the only downside is that it won't find files that were installed since last night. If a user recently installed a package, they probably looked at its contents. Still, things aren't perfect, but locate is a lot better than nothing. Another useful program is glimpse. I haven't used it, but it's supposed to make a (quickly) searchable database of the contents of all text files. It also only runs periodically. -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , ns.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
