plocate

locate(1) General Commands Manual locate(1)

NAME

   plocate - find files by name, quickly

SYNOPSIS

   plocate [OPTION]...  PATTERN...

DESCRIPTION

   plocate  finds  all  files on the system matching the given pattern (or all of the patterns if multiple are given). It does this by means of an index made by updatedb(8) or (less com‐
   monly) converted from another index by plocate-build(8).

   plocate is largely argument-compatible with mlocate(1), but is significantly faster. In particular, it rarely needs to scan through its entire database, unless  the  pattern  is  very
   short  (less  than three bytes) or you want to search for a regular expression. It does not try to maintain compatibility with BSD locate, or non-UTF-8 filenames and locales. Most I/O
   is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized so that output comes in the same order every time.

   When multiple patterns are given, plocate will search for files that match all of them. This is the main incompatibility with mlocate(1), which searches for files that  match  one  or
   more patterns, unless the -A option is given.

   By  default,  patterns  are taken to be substrings to search for.  If at least one non-escaped globbing metacharacter (*, ? or []) is given, that pattern is instead taken to be a glob
   pattern (which means it needs to start and end in * for a substring match). If --regexp is given, patterns are instead taken to be (non-anchored) POSIX basic regular expressions,  and
   if --regex is given, patterns are taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.  All of this matches mlocate(1) behavior.

   Like  mlocate(1),  plocate shows all files visible to the calling user (by virtue of having read and execute permissions on all parent directories), and none that are not, by means of
   running with the setgid bit set to access the index (which is built as root), but by testing visibility as the calling user.

EXIT STATUS

   plocate exits with 0 to indicate that a match was found or that --help or --version were passed. Otherwise, plocate exits with status code 1, indicating that an error occurred or that
   no matches were found.

OPTIONS

   -A, --all
          Ignored for compatibility with mlocate(1).

   -b, --basename
          Match only against the file name portion of the path name, ie., the directory names will be excluded from the match (but still printed). This does not speed up the search,  but
          can suppress uninteresting matches.

   -c, --count
          Do not print each match. Instead, count them, and print out a total number at the end.

   -d, --database DBPATH
          Find  matches  in  the given database, instead of /var/lib/plocate/plocate.db.  This argument can be given multiple times, to search multiple databases.  It is also possible to
          give multiple databases in one argument, separated by :.  (Any character, including : and \, can be escaped by prepending a \.)

   -e, --existing
          Print only entries that refer to files existing at the time locate is run. Note that unlike mlocate(1), symlinks are not followed by default (and indeed, there is no option  to
          change this).

   -i, --ignore-case
          Do  a  case-insensitive  match as given by the current locale (default is case-sensitive, byte-by-byte match). Note that plocate does not support the full range of Unicode case
          folding rules; in particular, searching for ß will not give you matches on ss even in a German locale. Also note that this option will be somewhat slower than a  case-sensitive
          match, since it needs to generate more candidates for searching the index.

   -l, --limit LIMIT
          Stop searching after LIMIT matches have been found. If --count is given, the number printed out will be at most LIMIT.

   -N, --literal
          Print  entry  names  without quoting. Normally, plocate will escape special characters in filenames, so that they are safe for consumption by typical shells (similar to the GNU
          coreutils shell-escape-always quoting style), unless printing to a pipe, but this options will turn off such quoting.

   -0, --null
          Instead of writing a newline after every match, write a NUL (ASCII 0). This is useful for creating unambiguous output when it is to be processed by other tools (like xargs(1)),
          as filenames are allowed to contain embedded newlines.

   -r, --regexp
          Patterns are taken to be POSIX basic regular expressions.  See regex(7) for more information. Note that this forces a linear scan through the entire database, which is slow.

   --regex
          Like --regexp, but patterns are instead taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.

   -w, --wholename
          Match against the entire path name. This is the default, so unless -b is given first (see above), it will not do anything. This option thus exists only  as  compatibility  with
          mlocate(1).

   --help Print out usage information, then exit successfully.

   --version
          Print out version information, then exit successfully.

ENVIRONMENT

   LOCATE_PATH
          If  given, appended after the list of --database paths (whether an explicit is given or the default is used).  Colon-delimiting and character escaping follows the same rules as
          for --database.

AUTHOR

   Steinar H. Gunderson <steinar+plocate@gunderson.no>