Can someone give me tips on using the 'locate' command - with examples?
 

Hi.

Can someone give me tips on using the 'locate' command - with examples?

Thanks in advance.

I know this so far:

Also what is the deal with mlocate?

what's to explain? That's all I know about it, and the manpage is pretty self explanatory. You really need to ask specific questions, rather than expecting to be taught.

ignore the name mlocate, it's just a different implementation of the same service. M = merging with the updatedb tool.

I was just looking for a few quick examples.

locate myfile

locate anotherfile

locate athirdfile

;-)

Additional note;

'locate' can also be combined with 'grep' (ok, that should be obvious), to useful effect;

So, eg, if what you know is that the file that you are looking for, you probably stored in your downloads directory and it probably was a pdf file

locate downloads | grep -i pdf

might get you closer. Still not close enough? Well, let's say it also concerned ubuntu, maybe

locate downloads | grep -i pdf |grep -i ubuntu

is the thing that gets you there. More than that ought to be an application of similar principles and possibly a careful reading of the man page. Anything really clever, and you'll probably need 'find' instead.