[Blikkentrekker]

locate is, for whatever reason, tragically slow. The database format it uses is nonsensical and completely optimized for size on very outdated assumptions.

I use an implementation I have written in the shell itself whose database format is nothing more than every file path on the system separated by null bytes, that is simply grepped to find files; the speed difference is absurd.

  —— — time locate */meme.png
 /storage/home/user/pictures/macro/meme.png

 real  0m0.885s
 user  0m0.806s
 sys 0m0.010s
  —— — time greplocate /meme.png$
 /storage/home/user/pictures/macro/meme.png

 real  0m0.089s
 user  0m0.079s
 sys 0m0.011s

This implementation is highly naïve and simplistic, and offloads all the searching to GNU Grep, yet outperforms the actual `locate` command by an order of magnitude.

[Sesse__]

And plocate is yet orders of magnitude faster than GNU grep. :-) And updates its database faster. You don't specify which locate you're using, but mlocate and BSD locate are basically obsolete by now.

(Disclosure: I'm the author of plocate.)

[cf]

I'm a huge fan and use your program basically daily. I don't know why it's not the default in most systems.

[Sesse__]

Thank you! It's becoming the default now, slowly (e.g., it will be the default in Debian and Ubuntu from the next releases, and Fedora is in a process to make it replace mlocate right now). It's just a tad too new, only about a year since 1.0.0. :-)

[tambourine_man]

Nice. I do something similar. Why null byte instead of new line?

[Asooka]

Presumably to support filenames with newlines in them.

[tambourine_man]

Yeah but… gee

[Blikkentrekker]

Why take the risk? I'm fairly certain I have no files with newlines on my system but I see no reason to take the risk.

[gnubison]

Unrelated, but can I ask about your prompt?

[Blikkentrekker]

They are simply em-dashes, if an error should occur, they are replaced with numbers to indicate the error code; they are also color-coded to indicate when I'm not for instance in an SSH session by changing to another color:

  —— — true
  —— — false
  —— 1 sh -c 'exit 120'
   120 sh -c 'exit 20'
  — 20

It doesn't show the colors here of course.