[SOLVED] is the command locate too old for debian 13 xfce?
[SOLVED] I run sudo updatedb
locate is a command I've used in the past, but now, fresh installed with sudo apt get locate it doesn return anything.
locate --version returns
locate (GNU findutils) 4.10.0, from 2024
or, have I forgotten something?
run these two commands:
sudo apt install mlocate
sudo updatedb
sudo updatedb
thanks!
locate uses an index you need to update using updatedb before it is able to find anything.
updatedb may run periodically because of a cron job, but the index is probably missing right after installing it manually.
Why don't filesystems maintain such a database so you don't have to spend cycles on a file indexer ?
I guess because that adds extra complexity that isn't inherently necessary and can be added on top, plus it eats resources. You'll spend the cycles either way basically, at least this way it's optional. I don't bother with a file indexer because with SSDs nowadays, find is pretty fast, and how often do you search for files anyway?
Linux has APIs to get notified on file system events (fanotify, inotify) which would allow such a service to update itself whenever files are created/delete immediately, but locate is way older than that, from the 80s. I think popular DEs have something like that.
There's also ways to search for specific files that come with packages (e.g. dpkg -S), because the package manager already maintains an index of files that were installed by it, so you can use that for most stuff outside /home.
They do. You look at it every time you see the contents of your disk. It's just organised in a tree to make path based lookups fast and locate organises its database differently to make fast basename lookups.
Several distributions made an effort to replace locate with alternative and updated versions of it. For usage the command name is still locate, but the package name should be different, in example mlocate or plocate and there are other alternatives too. The main difference between the old and new versions is they are faster.
plocate is backwards-compatible with mlocate, and is much faster and more efficient than mlocate. source
From your personal experience, what do you prefer and why, if you don't mind :).
I actually don't have a preference. I usually just use the default locate implementation my distribution provides. I used mlocate before and when the distros switched to plocate, I rolled along with that without making efforts installing mlocate from a different source. Its the easiest and safest way to me. Usage and performance between mlocate and plocate seems to be identical in my experience (no benchmark, just how it "felt"). plocate is actually mlocate with a few patches for edge cases, if I understand it right.
I have it currently uninstalled due to an issue:
However, recently I had some issues with the locate and KDEs baloo (baloo can do content indexing too but I set it to only filename indexing, so its similar to locate). Those tools may have killed my previous system SSD and on my new one I noticed they used up Gigabytes of RAM and seem to be stuck. After investigating both tools seem to have choked on few filenames that contain unusual characters. Therefore I have disabled them for now until figured out how to deal with this (probably renaming) and try later again.
You can search the package database to determine which package(s) provide a file with dpkg --search $file
Is the package named findutils?
Just tried this on a recent Trixie amd64 install. locate isn't installed by default, but there is a locate/stable 4.10.0-3 package and it installs just fine for me.
undefined
sudo apt update sudo apt install locate
Btw, there's also
IFS=:; find $PATH -executable -iname "$1" -print
Speed advantages of a indexed DB don't matter much anymore with nowadays hardware.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't installed by default in the previous version either, and maybe even the one before that. It's a useful utility, after you locate it.