1.\" Copyright (c) 1990 The Regents of the University of California. 2.\" All rights reserved. 3.\" 4.\" %sccs.include.redist.man% 5.\" 6.\" @(#)locate.1 5.3 (Berkeley) 07/24/90 7.\" 8.Dd 9.Dt LOCATE 1 10.Os BSD 4.4 11.Sh NAME 12.Nm locate 13.Nd find files 14.Sh SYNOPSIS 15.Ar locate 16pattern 17.Sh DESCRIPTION 18.Nm Locate 19searches a database for all pathnames which match the specified 20.Ar pattern . 21The database is recomputed periodically, and contains the pathnames 22of all files which are publicly accessible. 23.Pp 24Shell globbing and quoting characters (``*'', ``?'', ``\e'', ``['' 25and ``]'') 26may be used in 27.Ar pattern , 28although they will have to be escaped from the shell. 29Preceding any character with a backslash (``\e'') eliminates any special 30meaning which it may have. 31The matching differs in that no characters must be matched explicitly, 32including slashes (``/''). 33.Pp 34As a special case, a pattern containing no globbing characters (``foo'') 35is matched as though it were ``*foo*''. 36.Sh FILES 37.Dw /var/db/locate.database 38.Di L 39.Dp Pa /var/db/locate.database 40.Dp 41.Sh SEE ALSO 42.Xr find 1 , 43.Xr fnmatch 3 44.br 45Paper in February, 461983 issue of the USENIX publication 47.Sy ;login: . 48.Sh HISTORY 494.4 BSD. 50