Hi Brian, I personally use 'locate' all the time, and rarely use 'find' if 'locate' is available.
The major problem I have with find is that it's slow. Even restricting the search space to a specific directory (as opposed to searching everything under "/") can be slow. For example, searching my home directory takes a while, due to the large number of Python virtual envs that I have. Sometimes searching a specific directory simply does not work with find due to the presence of symlinks. You have to wait for find to complete (which might take a while), realize that maybe symlinks are involved (which is not obvious) and re-run find with -L, hoping it will work. Searching from the root directory "/" with find is not just slow, but also clobbers the terminal with "Permission Denied" or "Operation Not Permitted" errors. You must remember to use 2>/dev/null (hoping that won't hide any useful errors). With locate instead you can search the entire filesystem and get your results in a few milliseconds, without thinking about edge cases. Also, if you want to always exclude certain filesystems or directories, with find you have to play with -prune or -xdev or similar, and repeat the same arguments every time. With locate, you can just edit one configuration file once and you're done. In my locate configuration I exclude things like my LXC/LXD containers: I never want results involving those. Those are the reasons why I wish locate was enabled everywhere, not just Ubuntu :-) Hope this helps! On Wed, May 22, 2019, 20:00 Brian Murray <br...@ubuntu.com> wrote: > The Ubuntu Foundations team was recently looking at an issue with > mlocate[1] and the effect it has on all users of Ubuntu. While that > specific issue is fixable there are also issues[2,3] with keeping > PRUNEFS and PRUNEPATHS current in updatedb.conf. So we ended up > questioning the usefulness of installing mlocate by default on systems > at all. We believe that find is an adequate replacement for mlocate but > want to hear from you about use cases where it may not be. I'll start > with a personal example: > > "I don't remember (because I need to know so infrequently) where the > meta-release file is cached on disk by update-manager and use locate to > find it. The find command itself is inadequate because the cached file > exists in both /home and /var." > > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880507 > [2] http://launchpad.net/bugs/827841 > [3] http://launchpad.net/bugs/1823518 > > Thanks, > -- > Brian Murray > > -- > ubuntu-devel mailing list > ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel >
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