On Tue, 2021-11-16 at 08:33 -0500, Bill Cole wrote: > > Worth noting: locate & updatedb aren't always installed. > Fair comment: they're a standard part of Fedora. IIRC they are also part of the RaspberryPi OS distro, so are likely to be included in Debian and most of its clones.
But: how many "intro to Linux" books mention 'updatedb' or 'locate'? They're not mentioned in 'UNIX in a Nutshell' (so maybe not in 'Linux in a Nutshell' either) or in the 'RaspberryPi User Guide', though they are in Michael Kopfler's 1999 Linux sysadmin book. You don't see them mentioned much in newsgroups either, so I'm left wondering how many Linux users who either taught themselves to use Linux or picked it up at work from a colleague would ever know about 'locate' and 'updatedb'? For that matter how many know about 'apropos'? And, even if they do, they may not discover 'locate' because 'apropos search' doesn't find either 'updatedb' or 'locate'. You have to enter 'apropos find' to discover that 'locate' exists, and even then you could get side tracked into trying to use the much more complex 'find' utility. Martin
