Re: Finding .m files on Mac with Tiger

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> locate is also very useful:
>
>         locate .m
>
> Usually you need to use it with grep:
>
>         locate .m | grep "filt.*[.]m$"  ;# find all filt*.m files

But won't that match things like this:

/home/bob/filth/porn.m

I'm only half joking - the thing is that the '.*' in the regex could match 
a slash '/' and the 'filt' could be part of a directory name.  I think 
this will do it correctly:

locate "*.m" | egrep 'filt[^/]*\.m$'

the '[^/]*' means that between 'filt' and '.m' there may be any number of 
non-slash characters.  The '$' may be unnecessary because the '*' is 
"greedy" and the "*.m" in the locate command insures that every line ends 
in '.m'


> locate uses a database created by updatedb.  I don't remember doing 
> anything to enable it, but this is an inherited mac, so your milage may 
> vary.

Yes, the updatedb is key.  It might not be searching the entire disk or 
disk array and you have to know what it is doing.  It also will have 
indexed things some time ago, but how long?  It depends on your settings. 
In my system, it runs as a root crontab.  There are security issues too.

Mike



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