Re: finding .m files using 'locate'

[Henry F. Mollet]

Thank you. I'm beginning to understand. It implies that a fink installation
makes it easier to find octave and octave-forge .m files.

What is the difference between locate and find? If both are to be used in
the terminal window why would I use locate, which requires the data base to
be brought up to date, when find will do the same thing all the time?
Henry


on 7/15/05 1:25 PM, Michael W. Martin at address@hidden wrote:

> 
> On Jul 15, 2005, at 1:41 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
> 
>> Most new unix systems, especially GNU/Linux systems have the
>> 'locate' command.  Here is a way to get a list of every directory
>> that contains at least one file with the .m extension:
> 
>      OSX/Tiger has locate also. However, for locate be useful, the
> database in /var/db/locate.database must be up-to-date. This is true
> of all Unix systems. Normally the database is created/updated by the
> system in the wee hours of the morning (at least on Tiger). If you
> leave you computer off at night, as most folks do, it will not create
> it. I schedule my Mac to come on at 7:00am and then periodic is told
> to run at 7:15am to update things. That aside, in a pinch one can run
> "sudo periodic weekly" in the terminal window to create the locate
> database. Keep in mind that locate is only as good as its database.
> 
>      As to Spotlight not finding anything in /usr. That is by design.
> Spotlight is designed to find a user's **own documents**, not
> something buried in the system. For the most part system stuff should
> be left alone. Past versions of OSX had the same behavior (Sherlock,
> for example), so this is not a something new in Spotlight/Tiger. Now
> Spotlight will find all of the .m files in the fink installation,
> which is where my files are, since fink is not viewed as a system
> directory.
> 
> 
>      But to solve the original problem, for a fast way to find all .m
> files in a directory, try:
> 
>          find . -name \*.m -print
> 
> The \*.m can be replaced to find just about anything.
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Michael W. Martin                   Phone: (281) 333-2177
> Draper Laboratory                   FAX:   (281) 333-5276
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> 




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