locate is a command I’ve used in the past, but now, fresh installed with sudo apt get locate it doesn return anything.

locate --version returns locate (GNU findutils) 4.10.0, from 2024

or, have I forgotten something?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    8·
    1 day ago

    Several distributions made an effort to replace locate with alternative and updated versions of it. For usage the command name is still locate, but the package name should be different, in example mlocate or plocate and there are other alternatives too. The main difference between the old and new versions is they are faster.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 day ago

      plocate is backwards-compatible with mlocate, and is much faster and more efficient than mlocate. source

      From your personal experience, what do you prefer and why, if you don’t mind :).

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 day ago

        I actually don’t have a preference. I usually just use the default locate implementation my distribution provides. I used mlocate before and when the distros switched to plocate, I rolled along with that without making efforts installing mlocate from a different source. Its the easiest and safest way to me. Usage and performance between mlocate and plocate seems to be identical in my experience (no benchmark, just how it “felt”). plocate is actually mlocate with a few patches for edge cases, if I understand it right.

        I have it currently uninstalled due to an issue:

        However, recently I had some issues with the locate and KDEs baloo (baloo can do content indexing too but I set it to only filename indexing, so its similar to locate). Those tools may have killed my previous system SSD and on my new one I noticed they used up Gigabytes of RAM and seem to be stuck. After investigating both tools seem to have choked on few filenames that contain unusual characters. Therefore I have disabled them for now until figured out how to deal with this (probably renaming) and try later again.