MacOS – Unable to Locate or update LocateDB Mac OS El Capitain, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave!

launchdmacmacos

Over the past few operating systems I've been noticing a trend, especially after Apple screwed around with the real and fake "root" user in El Capitan. Most especially, using the locate command. Whenever I try to update using the conventional:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

Which is prescribed by Apple when the locate command fails.
I've managed to use mdfind but prefer locate because I'm looking for files in the ENTIRE system and I don't care about keywords inside of files like MDFind echos, see here for more evidence of locate working better for this task than mdfind MDfind vs Locate. Thanks everyone, I will continue tinkering for now.

Best Answer

After quite a bit of tinkering and waiting to delete my question prior to posting an uneducated question, I found an old OSXDaily article that suggests another way to update the Locate DB. The command suggested is: sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb And searching for that command rather than the com.apple.locate.plist setup in launchd, I found this lovely article about changing the database update frequency. I however, took a somewhat different approach to updating the database, simply by adding a line to my daily crontab:

env EDITOR=nano sudo crontab -e

0 12 * * * sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb.

ctrl+x y [ENTER]

Thanks, I hope this helps someone going through the same annoying crap.

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