1 | <sect2>
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2 | <title>Contents</title>
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3 |
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4 | <para>The Findutils package contains the bigram, code, find, frcode, locate,
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5 | updatedb and xargs programs.</para>
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6 |
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7 | </sect2>
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8 |
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9 | <sect2><title>Description</title>
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10 |
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11 | <sect3><title>bigram</title>
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12 | <para>bigram is used together with code to produce older-style locate
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13 | databases. To learn more about these last three programs, read the locatedb.5
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14 | manual page.</para></sect3>
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15 |
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16 | <sect3><title>code</title>
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17 | <para>code is the ancestor of frcode. It was used in older-style locate
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18 | databases.</para></sect3>
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19 |
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20 | <sect3><title>find</title>
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21 | <para>The find program searches for files in a directory hierarchy which match
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22 | a certain criteria. If no criteria is given, it lists all files in the
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23 | current directory and it's subdirectories.</para></sect3>
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24 |
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25 | <sect3><title>frcode</title>
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26 | <para>updatedb runs a program called frcode to compress the list of file names
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27 | using front-compression, which reduces the database size by a factor of
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28 | 4 to 5.</para></sect3>
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29 |
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30 | <sect3><title>locate</title>
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31 | <para>Locate scans a database which contain all files and directories on a
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32 | filesystem. This program lists the files and directories in this
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33 | database matching a certain criteria. If a user is looking for a file this
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34 | program will scan the database and tell him exactly where the files he
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35 | requested are located. This only makes sense if the locate database is
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36 | fairly up-to-date else it will provide out-of-date information.</para></sect3>
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37 |
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38 | <sect3><title>updatedb</title>
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39 | <para>The updatedb program updates the locate database. It scans the entire
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40 | file system (including other file system that are currently mounted
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41 | unless it is told not to do so) and puts every directory and file it finds
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42 | into the database that's used by the locate program which retrieves this
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43 | information. It's a good practice to update this database once a day to
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44 | have it up-to-date whenever it is needed.</para></sect3>
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45 |
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46 | <sect3><title>xargs</title>
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47 | <para>The xargs command applies a command to a list of files. If there is
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48 | a need to perform the same command on multiple files, a file can be created
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49 | that contains all these files (one per line) and use xargs to perform that
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50 | command on the list.</para></sect3>
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51 |
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52 | </sect2>
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53 |
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