How Does locate Work. The locate command searches for a given pattern through a database file that is generated by the updatedb command. The found results are displayed on the screen, one per line. During the installation of the mlocate package, a cron job is created that runs the updatedb command every 24 hours.

What is use of locate command?

locate is a Unix utility which serves to find files on filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt database of files generated by the updatedb command or by a daemon and compressed using incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than find , but requires regular updating of the database.

How do I use the locate command in terminal?

To use locate, open a terminal and type locate followed by the file name you are looking for. In this example, I’m searching for files that contain the word ‘sunny’ in their name. Locate can also tell you how many times a search keyword is matched in the database.