FreeBSD – How to Delete the ‘Locate’ Database in FreeBSD

The cron job is defined in /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.

To run it immediately:

sudo updatedb

or better

sudo ionice -c3 updatedb

This is better because updatedb is set in the Idle I/O scheduling class, so that it do not disturb (from the I/O point of view) other applications. From ionice man page:

  -c class
          The scheduling class. 0 for none, 1 for real time, 2 for 
          best-effort, 3 for idle.

  ........................

  Idle   A program running with idle io priority will only get disk time
         when no other  program  has  asked  for disk io for a defined 
         grace period. The impact of idle io processes on normal system 
         activity should be zero. This scheduling class does not take a 
         priority argument. Presently, this scheduling class is permitted 
         for an ordinary user (since kernel 2.6.25).

Try this:

locate -r "wordpress-seo$"

Although i should mention that find offers huge variations of options over locate. You have found locate faster because it just reads from a database /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db while find search through files every time, whenever you give it something to search.

locate's database is updated by cron on a daily basis, you can also update the database manually anytime by:

sudo updatedb

This will make the files created after the daily cron update available in the locate database, so you will find those via locate. Also check the configuration file /etc/updatedb to see which filesystems, paths are being excluded.