[ALUG] 'locate' isn't always helpful, how to do better?

[Tim Green]

On 2/22/07, Eur Ing Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> While the 'locate' command is very useful at times, especially if you
> have lost a specific file it's much less useful when looking for, for
> example, a directory which has a rather common name.
>
> E.g. I was just trying to find where I have bits of vmware installed,
> doing a 'locate vmware' just produces zillions of lines of output. I
> don't (in this case) want to know all the files which are located
> somewhere below a 'vmware' directory, I just want to know the location
> of the directory.

If you find and locate are too scary, how about du and grep?

"du / | grep dir" will produce a tree list of all the directories on
your filesystem and their sizes (not a good idea if you remote
filesystems mounted) and then searches it for 'dir'.

"du -a /" does the same, but lists all files too and their block sizes.

Yeah, it's a big hack, but it searches the live filesystem rather the
locate database.

Hope this helps!
Tim.