Restrict search of locate to specific directories

For quickly getting help on a Bash builtin, use help:

help read

is what you want.

For man-page-like formatting, use

help -m read

or, even better,

help -m read | less

If you still insist on looking for it in the man page, I find what quickly gets me to a command's explanation is

/^\s*read [[]

This works because when a command is first explained, its name is indented slightly from the start of the line. In the particular case of read, this takes a little browsing before you get to the actual read documentation because (for obvious reasons) the word "read" is repeated a lot throughout the man page. The [[] means to match a [ which usually precedes optional parameters. (I usually leave out /^\s* and simply do /<built-in command> [[])

Another alternative

If you don't mind the format change, you can convert your man page to a DVI or PDF file:

man -T dvi bash >bash.dvi

or

man -T ps bash | ps2pdf - bash.pdf # Requires the Ghostscript suite for ps2pdf

Of course, given a DVI or PDF document, you can then do a text search easily.

There's no option for that in updatedb.conf. You'll have to arrange to pass options to updatedb manually.

With updatedb from GNU findutils, pass --localpaths.

updatedb --localpaths '/ /media/win_c/somewhere/Music /media/win_c/somewhere/Photos'

With updatedb from mlocate, there doesn't appear a way to specify multiple roots or exclude a directory from pruning, so I think you're stuck with one database per directory. Set the environment variable LOCATE_PATH to the list of databases:

updatedb --output ~/.media.mlocate.db --database-root /media/win_c/somewhere --prunepaths '/media/win_c/somewhere/Videos'

export LOCATE_PATH="$LOCATE_PATH:$HOME/.media.mlocate.db"