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.TH locate 1 "Oct 2020" plocate
.SH NAME
plocate \- find files by name, quickly
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B plocate
.I "[OPTION]..."
.I "PATTERN..."
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B 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
.BR updatedb (8)
or (less commonly) converted from another index by
.BR plocate-build (8).
plocate is largely argument-compatible with
.BR mlocate (1),
but is significantly
faster. In particular, it rarely needs to scan through its entire
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 locales. Most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are
synchronized so that output comes in the same order every time.
When multiple patterns are given,
.B plocate
will search for files that match
.I all
of them. This is the main incompatibility with
.BR 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
.B --regexp
is given, patterns are instead taken to be (non-anchored) POSIX basic
regular expressions, and if
.B --regex
is given, patterns are taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.
All of this matches
.BR mlocate (1)
behavior.
Like
.BR mlocate (1),
.B plocate
shows all files visible to the calling user (by virtue of
having read and execute permissions on all parent directories),
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 visibility as the calling user.
.SH EXIT STATUS
.B plocate
exits with 0 to indicate that a match was found or that
.B --help
or
.B --version
were passed. Otherwise,
.B plocate
exits with status code 1, indicating that an error occurred or that no matches were found.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
\fB\-A\fR, \fB\-\-all\fR
Ignored for compatibility with
.BR mlocate (1).
.TP
\fB\-b\fR, \fB\-\-basename\fR
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.
.TP
\fB\-c\fR, \fB\-\-count\fR
Do not print each match. Instead, count them, and print out a total
number at the end.
.TP
\fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-database\fR \fIDBPATH\fR
Find matches in the given database, instead of \fB/var/lib/plocate/plocate.db\fR.
This argument can be given multiple times, to search multiple databases.
It is also possible to give multiple databases in one argument, separated by
.BR : .
(Any character, including : and \\, can be escaped by prepending a \\.)
.TP
\fB\-e\fR, \fB\-\-existing\fR
Print only entries that refer to files existing at the time
.B locate
is run. Note that unlike
.BR mlocate (1),
symlinks are not followed by default (and indeed, there is no option
to change this).
.TP
\fB\-i\fR, \fB\-\-ignore\-case\fR
Do a case-insensitive match as given by the current locale
(default is case-sensitive, byte-by-byte match). Note that
.B plocate
does not support the full range of Unicode case folding rules;
in particular, searching for \fIß\fR will not give you matches on \fIss\fR
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.
.TP
\fB\-l\fR, \fB\-\-limit\fR \fILIMIT\fR
Stop searching after
.I LIMIT
matches have been found. If
.B \-\-count
is given, the number printed out will be at most \fILIMIT\fR.
.TP
\fB\-N\fR, \fB\-\-literal\fR
Print entry names without quoting. Normally,
.B plocate
will escape special characters in filenames, so that they are safe for
consumption by typical shells (similar to the GNU coreutils
.I shell-escape-always
quoting style), unless printing to a pipe, but this options will
turn off such quoting.
.TP
\fB\-0\fR, \fB\-\-null\fR
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 \fBxargs\fP(1)), as filenames are
allowed to contain embedded newlines.
.TP
\fB\-r\fR, \fB\-\-regexp\fR
Patterns are taken to be POSIX basic regular expressions.
See
.BR regex (7)
for more information. Note that this forces a linear scan
through the entire database, which is slow.
.TP
.B \-\-regex
Like \fB\-\-regexp\fR, but patterns are instead taken to
be POSIX
.I extended
regular expressions.
.TP
\fB\-w\fR, \fB\-\-wholename\fR
Match against the entire path name. This is the default,
so unless \fB-b\fR is given first (see above), it will not do
anything. This option thus exists only as compatibility with
.BR mlocate (1).
.TP
.B \-\-help
Print out usage information, then exit successfully.
.TP
.B \-\-version
Print out version information, then exit successfully.
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP
\fBLOCATE_PATH\fR
If given, appended after the list of \fB\-\-database\fR paths
(whether an explicit is given or the default is used).
Colon-delimiting and character escaping follows the same rules
as for \fB\-\-database\fR.
.SH AUTHOR
Steinar H. Gunderson <steinar+plocate@gunderson.no>
.SH SEE ALSO
\fBplocate-build\fP(8),
\fBmlocate\fP(1),
\fBupdatedb\fP(8)
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