How to use the Linux locate command to find any file

If you’re using Linux for the first time, you might be confused about how to search for files and directories on your computer. There are two Linux commands you can use to do this: find and locate. 

Although both commands have the same function, they work differently. The find command will search for the specified files in all of your computer’s directories. Meanwhile, the locate command will look for files only in your Linux database.

This article will explain how to use the Linux find and locate commands and why to use them.

What are the find and locate commands in Linux

One of the most useful Linux commands, the find command is a versatile tool for searching files and directories based on various criteria, such as name, type, and size, with results generated in real-time.

The locate command, on the other hand, is a faster option that relies on a pre-built database for quick file searches but may not provide real-time updates.

For the purposes of this guide, we will be using Ubuntu VPS. However, the steps should also work for Debian, CentOS, or any other distribution of Linux. If you don’t know how to connect to VPS,  you can follow this guide for using PuTTy to access your server before proceeding further.

Find command syntax

The most popular command to find and filter files on Linux is find. The basic syntax is as follows:

find <startingdirectory> <options> <search term>

It starts with the keyword find, which alerts Linux that whatever follows after will be used to find your file. The <startingdirectory> argument is the origin point of where you want to start the search. It can be replaced with several arguments, including:

• / (slash) — search the whole system.
• . (dot) — search from the folder you’re currently working on (current directory).
• ~ (tilde) — to search from your home folder.

The second argument <options> is dedicated to your file. This could be the file’s name, type, date of creation, etc. The third argument <search term> is where you will specify the relevant search term.

Find command examples

Let’s take a look at various use cases for the find command:

Using find to search by name

The most common method to look for a file is by its name. To run a simple search query using the name of the file, use the find command like this:

find . -name my-file

We used the -name option, and searched for a file called my-file. Note that we started the search in our current directory by using the . (dot) argument.

Keep in mind that the -name argument looks for case-sensitive terms in Linux. If you know the name of the file, but are not sure about its case sensitivity, use the following find command:

find . -iname my-file

You can also search for all files without a certain keyword in their name. There are two ways to do this. The first method involves using the –not keyword in the following manner:

find . -not -name my-file

Second, we can use the exclamation symbol (!). However, it has to be preceded by the escape identifier (\) to let Linux know that this is the part of the find command.

find . \! -name my-file

You can look for multiple files with a common format like .txt as well:

find . -name “*.txt”

This will list down all the text files starting with the current folder.

Lastly, if you want to find a certain file by name and remove it, use the -delete argument after the file name:

find . -name my-file -delete

Using find to search by type

Linux allows users to list all information based on their types. There are several filters that you can use:

• d – directory or folder
• f – normal file
• l – symbolic link
• c – character devices
• b – block devices

A simple example of using a file type can be seen below:

find / -type d

This will list all of the current directories in your system since we searched from our root directory with the / (slash) symbol.

You can also combine the –type and -name options to narrow down your searches further:

find / -type f -name my-file

This will look for files named my-file, excluding directories or links.

Using find to search by time

Use this command if you want to search for files based on when they were accessed and modification time footprints. Linux keeps track of the files using these three timestamps.

• Access Time (-atime) – when the file was either read or written into.
• Modification Time (-mtime) – when the file was modified.
• Change Time (-ctime) – when the file’s meta-data was updated.

This option has to be used with a number that specifies how many days have passed since the file was accessed, modified, or changed:

find / -atime 1

This command will show all files that were accessed a day ago, starting from your current time.

We can narrow down our queries even more by adding plus (+) and minus (–) signs preceding the number of days. For instance:

find / -mtime +2

It lists down all the files that have a modification time of more than two days ago.

To find all files whose metadata was updated less than a day ago, run the following:

find / -ctime -1

While less commonly used, there are some additional arguments that are also related to timed searches. The -mmin argument looks for modified files on a minute basis:

find / -mmin -1

Also, we have the -newer argument, which can be used to compare the age of two or more files and display the newer one.

find / -newer my-file

What you’ll get are all of the files that are more recently modified than your file.

Using find to search by size

Linux also lets you search for files based on their sizes. The syntax for searching files by size is:

find <startingdirectory> -size <size-magnitude> <size-unit>

You can specify the following size units:

• c – bytes
• k – kilobytes
• M – megabytes
• G – gigabytes
• b – 512-byte chunks

Here’s a simple example of how to use the find command for file sizes is as follows:

find / -size 10M

Here we search for all the files in your system that are exactly 10 megabytes. Just like when searching based on time, you can filter your searches further using the plus and minus signs:

find / -size +5G

It will display all the files that are more than five gigabytes in size.

Using find to search by ownership

Linux allows you to narrow down your searches based on file ownership. To find files with a certain owner, run the following command:

find / -user john

The script will return a list of all files that the user named john owns. Similar to usernames, we can also find files through group names:

find / -group classroom

Using find to search by permissions

Users can search for files based on file permissions using  -perm option. For example:

find / -perm 644

In Linux, 644 corresponds to read and write permission. That means this command will look for all the files that have only read and write permissions. You can play around with this option further:

find / -perm -644

With an addition of a dash symbol, it will return with all the files that have at least the 644 permission.

Read more on Linux permissions and various codes corresponding to other permissions.

Other useful find command options

In addition to the ones mentioned above, there are many other use cases for the Linux file command.

For example, to look for empty files and folders on your system, use the following:

find / -empty

Similarly, to look for all the executables saved on your drive, utilize the -exec option:

find / -exec

To look for readable files, you can run the following command:

find / -read

As you can see, there is a ton of options at hand for users to tailor their queries as they wish. Let us look at the other way to locate files in Linux – the locate command.

Locate command syntax

The locate command is a useful alternative, as it is faster than the find command when performing searches. That’s because the former only scans your Linux database instead of the whole system. Furthermore, the syntax is relatively easier to write.

You can use the command to search for files using this syntax:

locate [my-file]

The vanilla locate command can sometimes return files that have been deleted, if the database wasn’t updated. The best solution is to manually update the database by running the following:

sudo updatedb

How to install the locate package

Some Linux distributions come with the locate package already installed. Modern Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu 22.04 and newer) now use plocate rather than the older mlocate package. If your distribution doesn’t have it, you can add it using the following command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plocate

For Red Hat-based distributions like CentOS or Fedora, you would use:

sudo yum install plocate

Locate command examples

We’ll share with you the most common applications of the Linux locate command.

Using locate to search the exact file name

The basic syntax only allows you to search for files that contain the search term. If you want to get the file with the exact name, you can use the -r option and add dollar symbol ($) at the end of your search term, for example:

locate -r my-file$

Using locate to count the number of files

In order to tell how many files appear on your search result, insert -c after the locate command.

locate -c my-file

Instead of listing all the files, it will give you the total number of them.

Using locate to ignore case sensitive

Use -i on your linux locate command to ignore case sensitive files. For instance:

locate -i my-file

All of the files with this name will be shown, regardless of any uppercase or lowercase symbols found.

Using locate to show existing files

Just like we’ve mentioned, the Linux locate command can even show you a deleted file if you haven’t updated the database. Thankfully, you can get around this problem by using  -e option, like this:

locate -e my-file

By doing this, you will only get files that exist at the time you perform the locate command.

Using locate to disable errors while searching

-q option will prevent any errors from showing up when the search is being processed. To do this, simply enter:

locate -q my-file

Using locate to limit the number of search results

If you want to limit the number of search results, -n <number> will do the trick. However, remember that you need to put the option at the end of the command line. Take a look at this example:

locate my-file n 10

The script will only display the first 10 files it discovers, even when there are more.

Conclusion

You can search for files on your server using the find and locate commands in Linux. These two powerful tools have a lot of potential to streamline your work. Therefore, we encourage you to give both of them a go and see which one is more suitable for you. Here’s a short summary of what we talked about:

• Use find to search for files based on name, type, time, size, ownership and permissions, in addition to some other useful options
• Install and use Linux locate command to perform faster system-wide searches for files. This command also allows you to filter out by name, case-sensitive, folder, and so on.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!