Re: limiting the directory to locate and search by file type

[James Youngman]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 12:11 AM, Peng Yu <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 5:47 PM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
>> You can achieve this by using locate --regex.
>
> Suppose I want to restrict the search to /tmp, what regex I should specify?

locate --regex '^/tmp\($\|/\)'

... but most distributions don't index /tmp.  Check your system's crontab.

> Doing file test will be slow, as I think that the point of locate is
> to avoid accessing the filesystem to speedup. Is there any development
> on adding filetype information to the database so that it will
> searchable within the database.

I'm not working on it right now.   But I think that it's a good idea
to move in this direction (and caching directory-level information
will also probably allow us to speed up indexing).  Would you like to
work on this?

James.

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