Re: finding .m files using 'locate'

[Michael W. Martin]

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.


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Michael W. Martin                   Phone: (281) 333-2177
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