locate, a
Unix utility first created in 1983, serves to find
files on
filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt
database of files generated by
updatedb or by a
daemon and compressed using
incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than
find, but requires regular updating of the database. This sacrifices overall efficiency (because of the regular interrogation of filesystems even when no user needs information) and absolute accuracy (since the database does not update in
real time) for significant speed improvements (particularly on very large filesystems).
