Finding the location of a file may not be an everyday task. But when you do need it, you really need it. For example I wanted to update the libffmpeg.so from Opera Browser with the one from the Chromium Browser. That meant I needed to find where each were. The 'Files' app does have a search feature. This is not about it. This is how you do it in the terminal.

To help us in the terminal, there is locate. Locate is a library you can apt install. It maintains a database of file data enabling us to quickly find files. This is one of the reasons why I like it over the Files app. In addition there is a powerful utility called find. It allows us much more control but is usually slow and it deserves its own article.

Installation

Installation is straightforward:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install locate

Usage

The basic usage includes providing part of the name.

locate libffmpeg.so

You can also use regex to files that match a certain regex. For example to find a file like /var/www/jdeen.com/shared/private/uploads/proposals/PR0123 srs.pdf.

locate -ir '^/var/www/jdeen.com/shared/\([^.][^/]\+/\)\+PR0123[^/]*$'

locate is a simple command. Its not very powerful. But its very very fast once the indexing is done.