Manual: plocate

locate(1)					   General Commands Manual					   locate(1)

NAME
       plocate - find files by name, quickly

SYNOPSIS
       plocate [OPTION]...  PATTERN...

DESCRIPTION
       plocate	finds  all files on the system matching the given pattern (or all of the patterns if multiple are given). It
       does this by means of an index made  by	updatedb(8)  or	 (less	commonly)  converted  from  another  index  by	plo‐
       cate-build(8).

       plocate	is  largely argument-compatible with mlocate(1), but is significantly faster. In particular, it rarely needs
       to scan through its entire database, unless the pattern is very short (less than three bytes) or you want  to  search
       for  a  regular expression. It does not try to maintain compatibility with BSD locate, or non-UTF-8 filenames and lo‐
       cales. Most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized so that output comes in the same order every
       time.

       When multiple patterns are given, plocate will search for files that match all of them. This is the  main  incompati‐
       bility with mlocate(1), which searches for files that match one or more patterns, unless the -A option is given.

       By  default,  patterns  are taken to be substrings to search for.  If at least one non-escaped globbing metacharacter
       (*, ? or []) is given, that pattern is instead taken to be a glob pattern (which means it needs to start and end in *
       for a substring match). If --regexp is given, patterns are instead taken to be (non-anchored) POSIX basic regular ex‐
       pressions, and if --regex is given, patterns are taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.	 All of this matches
       mlocate(1) behavior.

       Like mlocate(1), plocate shows all files visible to the calling user (by virtue of having read  and  execute  permis‐
       sions  on  all  parent directories), and none that are not, by means of running with the setgid bit set to access the
       index (which is built as root), but by testing visibility as the calling user.

EXIT STATUS
       plocate exits with 0 to indicate that a match was found or that --help or --version were passed.	 Otherwise,  plocate
       exits with status code 1, indicating that an error occurred or that no matches were found.

OPTIONS
       -A, --all
	      Ignored for compatibility with mlocate(1).

       -b, --basename
	      Match  only against the file name portion of the path name, ie., the directory names will be excluded from the
	      match (but still printed). This does not speed up the search, but can suppress uninteresting matches.

       -c, --count
	      Do not print each match. Instead, count them, and print out a total number at the end.

       -d, --database DBPATH
	      Find matches in the given database, instead of /var/lib/plocate/plocate.db.  This argument can be given multi‐
	      ple times, to search multiple databases.	It is also possible to give multiple databases in one argument, sep‐
	      arated by :.  (Any character, including : and \, can be escaped by prepending a \.)

       -e, --existing
	      Print only entries that refer to files existing at the time locate is run. Note that unlike  mlocate(1),	sym‐
	      links are not followed by default (and indeed, there is no option to change this).

       -i, --ignore-case
	      Do  a  case-insensitive  match as given by the current locale (default is case-sensitive, byte-by-byte match).
	      Note that plocate does not support the full range of Unicode case folding rules; in particular, searching	 for
	      ß	 will not give you matches on ss even in a German locale. Also note that this option will be somewhat slower
	      than a case-sensitive match, since it needs to generate more candidates for searching the index.

       -p, --ignore-spaces
	      Ignore punctuation and spaces when matching patterns.

       -l, --limit LIMIT
	      Stop searching after LIMIT matches have been found. If --count is given, the number printed  out	will  be  at
	      most LIMIT.

       -N, --literal
	      Print entry names without quoting. Normally, plocate will escape special characters in filenames, so that they
	      are  safe	 for consumption by typical shells (similar to the GNU coreutils shell-escape-always quoting style),
	      unless printing to a pipe, but this options will turn off such quoting.

       -0, --null
	      Instead of writing a newline after every match, write a NUL (ASCII 0). This is useful for creating unambiguous
	      output when it is to be processed by other tools (like xargs(1)), as filenames are allowed to contain embedded
	      newlines.

       -r, --regexp
	      Patterns are taken to be POSIX basic regular expressions.	 See regex(7) for more information. Note  that	this
	      forces a linear scan through the entire database, which is slow.

       --regex
	      Like --regexp, but patterns are instead taken to be POSIX extended regular expressions.

       -w, --wholename
	      Match  against the entire path name. This is the default, so unless -b is given first (see above), it will not
	      do anything. This option thus exists only as compatibility with mlocate(1).

       --help Print out usage information, then exit successfully.

       --version
	      Print out version information, then exit successfully.

ENVIRONMENT
       LOCATE_PATH
	      If given, appended after the list of --database paths (whether an explicit is given or the default  is  used).
	      Colon-delimiting and character escaping follows the same rules as for --database.

AUTHOR
       Steinar H. Gunderson 

SEE ALSO
       plocate-build(8), mlocate(1), updatedb(8)

plocate							  Oct 2020						   locate(1)