Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Finding Files from an Index with locate

When you use the find command, it searches recursively through each directory each time you request a file. This is slow, as you can imagine. Fortunately, Ubuntu ships with a cron job that creates an index of all the files on your system every night. Searching this index is extremely fast, which means that if the file you are looking for has been around since the last index, this is the preferable way of searching.

To look for a file in your index, use the command locate followed by the names of the files you want to find, like this:

matthew@seymour:~$ locate myfile.txt

On a relatively modern computer (1.5GHz or higher), locate should be able to return all the matching files in less than one second. The ...