Re: locate(1) man page hard to understand, please rewrite

[Stepan Kasal]

Hallo,

On 07 Jul 2002 00:26:48 -0400, Paul D. Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
A few corrections:

>   $ locate /tmp

will match every line containing substring "/tmp" since it contains no
metacharacter.  Thus it's equivalent to

>   $ locate '*/tmp*'

What you need is

    $ locate '*/tmp'

which is equivalent to grep pattern '^.*/tmp$' or '/tmp$'.

Well, I was able to catch this from the parts of the manpage you have cited.
You may try to re-write it, if you want, but be careful that your version
still accurately describes the behaviour of locate.

When you perform the above command, you may get

/home/tmp
/usr/local/tmp

and similar, and not get the obvious ones: "/tmp", "/var/tmp" and so on.

The reason is that the updatedb command is often configured to omit the
most obvious useless directories, like /tmp and /mnt .
Search your cron configuration for details.

Hope this helps,
        Stepan Kasal