[CentOS] Recommendation for a Linux alternative to Centos - ATH9K disaster

Fri Jan 28 12:46:19 UTC 2011
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 2:56 AM, John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Always Learning wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the explanation. Now I know why locate never usually worked
>> for me - it hadn't updated.
>>
>> find is fast, especially when I restrict the search paths.
>
> But locate is faster still, in all but the smallest of cases.  I'd only tend
> to use find if I had reason to think that changes had made the locate database
> invalid.  locate with a regexp is plain good and fast.

Yeah, way back in yesteryear under UNIX, the "find" and the "locate"
tools were part of one package. Under RHEL/CentOS, locate is in the
"mlocate" package, and some folks making stripped servers rip it out
to avoid storing the database. (Think embedded OS's and NFS hosted /
and /var partitions.)

One *does* have to remember the "mlocate" package's limitations. It
doesn't browse network mounted directories, it doesn't browse /tmp or
look for other excluded targets, and it runs with the nightly cron
jobs. So if you're looking for files in /var/tmp/ or an NFS share, or
files that were created an hour ago, well, it's back to "find".

I have found it very useful, when checking updates on a machine, to
become root and run the "updatedb" command to get the mlocate database
updated.