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I will like to use "find" and locate" to search for source files in my project, but they take a long time to run. Are there faster alternatives to these programs I don't know about, or ways to speed up the performance of these programs?

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locate should already be plenty fast, considering that it uses a pre-built index (the primary caveat being that it needs to be kept up to date), while find has to read the directory listings. – afrazier Sep 29 '11 at 13:22
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Which locate are you using? mlocate is faster than slocate by a long way (note that whichever package you have installed, the command is still locate, so check your package manager) – Paul Sep 29 '11 at 13:35
@benhsu, when I run find /usr/src -name fprintf.c on my OpenBSD desktop machine, it returns the locations of those source files in less than 10 seconds. locate fprintf.c | grep '^/usr/src.*/fprintf.c$' comes back in under a second. What is your definition of "long time to run" and how do you use find and locate? – Kusalananda Sep 29 '11 at 14:15
@Paul, I am using mlocate. – benhsu Sep 29 '11 at 17:15
@KAK, I would like to use the output of find/locate to open a file in emacs. the use case I have in mind is, I wish to edit the file, I type the file name (or some regexp matching the file name) into emacs, and emacs will use find/locate to bring up a list of files matching it, so I will like response time fast enough to be interactive (under 1 second). I have about 3 million files in $HOME, one thing I can do is make my find command prune out some of the files. – benhsu Sep 29 '11 at 17:22

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Searching for source files in a project

Use a simpler command

Generally, source for a project is likely to be in one place, perhaps in a few subdirectories nested no more than two or three deep, so you can use a (possibly) faster command such as

(cd /path/to/project; ls *.c */*.c */*/*.c)

Make use of project metadata

In a C project you'd typically have a Makefile. In other projects you may have something similar. These can be a fast way to extract a list of files (and their locations) write a script that makes use of this information to locate files. I have a "sources" script so that I can write commands like grep variable $(sources programname).

Speeding up find

Search fewer places, instead of find / … use find /path/to/project … where possible. Simplify the selection criteria as much as possible. Use pipelines to defer some selection criteria if that is more efficient.

Speeding up locate

Ensure it is indexing the locations you are interested in. Read the man page and make use of whatever options are appropriate to your task.

   -U <dir>
          Create slocate database starting at path <dir>.

   -d <path>
          --database=<path> Specifies the path of databases to search  in.


   -l <level>
          Security  level.   0  turns  security checks off. This will make
          searchs faster.   1  turns  security  checks  on.  This  is  the
          default.

Remove the need for searching

Maybe you are searching because you have forgotten where something is or were not told. In the former case, write notes (documentation), in the latter, ask? Conventions, standards and consistency can help a lot.

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up vote 3 down vote

I used the "speeding up locate" part of RedGrittyBrick's answer. I created a smaller db:

updatedb -o /home/benhsu/ben.db -U /home/benhsu/ -e "uninteresting/directory1 uninteresting/directory2"

then pointed locate at it: locate -d /home/benhsu/ben.db

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