I can locate my home!

By Filip Salo; published on June 11, 2007. Tags: linux

locate and updatedb make a beautiful pair. updatedb builds, usually once a day, a database of filenames on your computer, and locate searches that database.

So, instead of doing a system-wide find when you're looking for a file somewhere (as in anywhere), you can use locate to search through the database, which is way faster.

Unfortunately, NFS shares are excluded from the database here at work, so a lot of neat stuff - pretty much all the neat stuff, really - just isn't locate-able.

Which is why I build my own database.

updatedb runs every night at 4:15, courtesy of my crontab:

# min(0-59) hour(0-23)  dom(1-31) mon(1-12) dow(0-6:sunfirst)  command
15 4 * * * updatedb --database-root /home/ME --output /home/ME/.locate.db

That creates .locate.db, containing all the file names in my home directory.

In addition to that, I set two aliases in my .bashrc:

alias locate="locate --database /home/stp02/salo/.locate.db:"
alias hlocate="locate --database /home/stp02/salo/.locate.db"

That makes locate search my database as well as the default one (the --database option takes a colon-separated list of databases, and an empty entry is taken to mean the default db), and hlocate searches only my home directory.

Sweet and neat. I could build additional databases for other interesting NFS shares, and add these to the locate alias, too. But I'm hungry.