LOCATE FIND AND WHEREIS

From: John T. Douglass <john.douglass@anlw.anl.gov>

Also see UPDATEDB

Just to point out the differences between locate, find, and whereis:

whereis: will search only particular paths to find binaries and or manpages. The manpages tells you where whereis looks.

locate: locate uses a database created by an updatedb to efficiently locate files. Works great, assuming your database is updated often enough to be reasonable upto date. Most boxes using locate have the updatedb occuring in cron.

find: find is perhaps one of the most powerful commands there is. For just locating a file/program of a particular name, it'll definitely be slower than locate or whereis becuase it will search each and every path recursively from it's start point. But for instance tell me how to use locate or where is to things like the following:

to find all directories on the system whose permissions of 777

find / \( -type d -a -perm -777 \) -print

find all core files in home directories and remove them

find /home -name core -exec rm {} \;

find all files owned by a particular user no matter whose home directory they are in:

find /home -user <usernmae> -print

find all files that have been modified (or had their modification time changed) in the last 30 days:

find / -mtime -30 -print

find all trc files older than 30 days and remove:

find /dirpath \( -name \*.trc -a -mtime +30 \) -exec rm {} \;


And the list goes on. Yes find will recursively descend the path each time looking at every file to determine whether it matches the criteria but there are a lot of times that this is exactly what you
want. As an experienced system administrator I have learned the power of the find command and have found it to be one of the single most important commands I know.

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