A few days back, I was on a server wherein I had to find the location of a file in the\u00a0file system. Naturally like most newbies, I instantly hit the ‘find’ command. \u00a0Something like<\/p>\n
[shell]sudo find \/ -name someFileName.ext[\/shell]<\/p>\n
Naturally the command took a lot of time to find the file (Local to server relay not being helpful either). \n As soon as i hit the command<\/p>\n [shell]locate someFileName.ext[\/shell]<\/p>\n BING!!! <\/strong><\/p>\n \n The result popped up.. in less than a second !!! \n Now here’s the real thing … \n Locate<\/strong> therefore is much faster<\/strong> as compared to find<\/strong> when searching for unique items.<\/p>\n \n \n But there are a few disadvantages to this method as well.<\/p>\n \n Locate<\/strong> might miss out on files created within a 24 hour period. This is because the database through which locate searches is updated automatically through a cron job that usually runs in 24 hour intervals. Find<\/strong> is the winner here … however to manually run the job for updating the database in Ubuntu, you can simply run a command<\/p>\n [shell]sudo updatedb[\/shell]<\/p>\n and get the job done.<\/p>\n \n Find<\/strong> also contains a number of filters like \u00a0specifying type -d (Directory) which aren’t present in locate. \u00a0This means that locate command for a directory would return files as well as directories.\u00a0So in essence locate returns a large number of results whereas find can narrow them down<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Essentially it’s the situation that should describe which command to use. But I would still suggest you give locate a try. You would be\u00a0pleasantly\u00a0surprised.<\/p>\n \n \n A few days back, I was on a server wherein I had to find the location of a file in the\u00a0file system. Naturally like most newbies, I instantly hit the ‘find’ command. \u00a0Something like [shell]sudo find \/ -name someFileName.ext[\/shell] Naturally the command took a lot of time to find the file (Local to server relay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":11,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[634,260,635],"class_list":["post-4181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-find-command","tag-linux","tag-locate-command"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
\nAt one point it grew so frustrating that I had to stop it and search for an alternative . Thats when I met Locate<\/strong>.. The lesser known brother of Find, WhereIs and Grep.<\/p>\n
\nThis was a real time saving alternative. Comparing 1 sec to over 20 sec and that too over a remote server, man I could have killed for this sort of performance. Thanks to ‘locate’ for having saved me some\u00a0prison\u00a0time \ud83d\ude00 .<\/p>\n
\nLocate<\/strong> searches for files from a database<\/strong> that is created automatically. This database contains the list of files in a\u00a0file system\u00a0and their associated paths. So essentially locate simply searches through a file and returns a match.
\n Find<\/strong> on the other hand searches through files in the file system in real time<\/strong>. It’ll definitely be slower because it will search each and every path recursively from it’s start point.<\/p>\n