Ubuntu – Using locate to find a directory

I use locate all the time to find files that I know the name of, locate is very fast and I love that. For recently created files find is great, normally with recently created files I know where basically they were created so I don't have to search my entire file system.

When I've forgotten the location of a directory however neither find nor locate seem ideal.

Locate always spits out far too much information because every file within a directory is also a match for locate. For instance if I was searching for a directory named log somewhere on my file system locate log would return tons and tons of results. If I do the same thing with find, find / -name log -type d find takes minutes to run and spits out all sorts of permissions errors every time it encounters a folder it can't read.

Is there a better way?

Answer: So I'm sticking with grep until I find something else:

locatedir () {
    for last; do true; done
    if [[ $last == *\/* ]]
    then
        locate $@ | grep "${last}\$"
    else
        locate $@ | grep "/${last}\$"
    fi
}