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 commonly) converted from another in-
dex by plocate-build(8).
plocate is largely argument-compatible with mlocate(1), but is signifi-
cantly faster. In particular, it rarely needs to scan through its en-
tire 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 lo-
cales. Most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchro-
nized 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 reg-
ular expressions, and if --regex is given, patterns are taken to be
POSIX extended regular expressions. All of this matches mlocate(1) be-
havior.
Like mlocate(1), plocate shows all files visible to the calling user
(by virtue of having read and execute permissions on all parent direc-
tories), 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 visi-
bility 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/plo-
cate/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, in-
cluding : and \, can be escaped by prepending a \.)
-e, --existing
Print only entries that refer to files existing at the time lo-
cate is run. Note that unlike mlocate(1), symlinks are not fol-
lowed 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 (de-
fault 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 con-
sumption 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 file-
names 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 ex-
tended regular expressions.
-w, --wholename
Match against the entire path name. This is the default, so un-
less -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>
SEE ALSO
plocate-build(8), mlocate(1), updatedb(8)
plocate Oct 2020 locate(1)
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