Ubuntu – Locate does not locate files

14.04locate

I have not used locate for a while and today when I look for a file that I had put away for more than a year, locate does not pick it up. I ran find to get it.

It appears that none of the files in my home directory are in the index. Only files & folders from system directories like usr, var, are located.

I tried updatedb but no luck. Has my home directory somehow got excluded from the index?

Best Answer

Open the file /etc/updatedb.conf and check if the excluded path is listed in the PRUNEPATHS or the excluded path is using one of the filesystems enumerated in PRUNEFS.

If so, modify the conf file, and run again the sudo updatedb command.

(If you have encrypted your home directory while installing, then remove from the config the encryptfs entries.)

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Ubuntu – 16.04 Locate not finding files in /mnt

In all shells, using *.iso expands to a list of files before calling the command, so in

locate *.iso

the shell expands automatically the expression creating a filename list from files in the current directory. Suppose there where in the current directory two iso files file1.iso and file2.iso; the resulting command will actually be:

locate file1.iso file2.iso

then the shell will execute it. So, locate will try to find files containing these two strings, effectively searching for "*file1.iso*" or "*file2.iso*".

That's why locate iso find more files than locate *.iso; locate is actually searching for "*iso*" in the first case. The solution (and right way to use it, IMHO) is quoting the special chars of the shell when the command accepts expressions using them, like the following find command:

find /etc/ -type f -iname "*.conf"

If there where two or more conf files in the current directory and we don't use quotes, the find command will fail parsing the second filename generated, and our hair density will be severely reduced in desperation and googling ;D because the error message seems not related to the absence of quotes.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – 16.04 Locate not finding files in /mnt

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