obtaining application paths

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi Phil,

The locate command does _not_ walk all your directory trees. Instead,  
it reads the paths from a database file and filters out the relevant  
lines, which makes the results appear instantly. It works very quickly  
on both my 2.16Ghz MacBook and my 450Mhz PowerMac. There must be  
something else going on that slows it down on your machine.

You're right that locate doesn't find all copies of a file. Some  
copies are not in the database yet, because the database isn't  
immedaitely updated. Other copies are not found because they are on a  
drive that the database doesn't have information about. I'm not  
completely sure, but it is indeed possible that located works with  
publicly available drives only.

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
http://economy-x-talk.com
http://www.salery.biz
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 >.

On 1 apr 2009, at 00:13, Phil Davis wrote:

> However (if I understand correctly), locate only returns file paths  
> on *publicly available* volumes. I used it to look for one of my Rev  
> standalones; it missed everything except the copies on my external  
> HDs. I used 'find' to get paths on my internal (non-public) HD and  
> again just in my user account - it worked, but it's very slow. It  
> walks all directory trees.
> -- 
> Phil Davis
>
> PDS Labs
> Professional Software Development
> http://pdslabs.net