find and locate

I've been using Unix find on the command line for many years and it's certainly saved me some time trying to find files or strings within files.

Here's an example usage that I've liked to use:

find . -name "*.java" -exec grep -l "Boolean" {} \;

This will find all java files from the current directory down that contain the string Boolean and then list their paths.

For something a little more basic where I just need to search for file extension types I use something like this:

find . -name "*.properties" -print

But, one thing I never heard about until yesterday was the locate command.

Locate uses indexed search results and was helpful when I was trying to find some JAR files in a local repository.

Basically it takes find and cron together, run at scheduled intervals, to index the local filesystem. Then when you use locate, it will use that index to quickly give back results, that might have taken long with just the find command.