Re: Simple Query

[Bret Hughes <bhughes elevating com>]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 20:58, Jack Bowling wrote:
> ** Reply to message from Logan Linux <loganlinux hotmail com> on Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:46:13 +1000
> 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > Being a noob most of my time is taken up "hacking" commands that Ive pieced 
> > together from what Ive been gathering from the usual sources.
> > 
> > Something I dont understand (forgive me) is the locate and find commands.
> > 
> > Basically I want to
> > dir nessus* /s
> > ie. find all files and folders containing nessus and searching in all sub 
> > directories.
> > 
> > I thought locate was doing that by default but I jynxed it today.
> > Please help!
> 
> Locate will only find a file if three things have occurred:
> 
> 1) The package was installed on your system.
> 2) The package was installed via rpm.
> 2) The updatedb process has run before you did the locate command.

Jack I don't believe this is the case.  locate and find are not part of
rpm in any way other than the fact that the are installed via rpm on rpm
based systems.

The updatedb program is a symlink to slocate that I am assuming knows
that if it is called as updatedb to actully run as if  slocate -u was
run.

The updatedb program actually builds a database of every file on your
system by recursing the entire local file structure  

This means that files containing the string nessus could be found by
running locate nessus as long as the daily cron stuff was run since it
was installed.  This will work whether or not the file was installed via
an rpm package.

I use find to limit the search or when I want to do things like date,
owner, perm stuff

to use find to find the files something like 

find / -type f -name 'nessus*'

this will start the search from the / dir

man find and man locate does a fair job of explaining how to do it and
info find goins into a bit more detail.

HTH

Bret

the single quote keeps the shell from doing funky expansion things.