File doesn't exist in Linux although it's located in Terminal

Question

I'm a bit new to unix/linux environment, but I have a small problem.

I'm using "locate" to find the path of a file I need, it gives me the path for it, but the file doesn't exist in that path, like that:

locate test1.txt

/home/user/test files/text1.txt
/home/user/test1.txt~

"test files" directory is where I was keeping the file and I copied it to the home directory once but I deleted it, no idea what it keeps telling me there is still a tmp file for it.

it worth mentioning that I used the command:

locate test1.txt~ |xargs -n1 rm

to remove that tmp file, but maybe that what caused the problem. I tried to show hidden files, and check for temp files, didn't find it either.

any clue what happened?

Answer 1

You can update the db, using sudo updatedb and then try running locate again for getting the correct output.

This is because the db is updated periodically and using the command sudo updatedb will force the database to get updated at that moment itself.

Answer 2

Locate command does not searches the whole filesystem. It picks up from the db file . It may be /var/lib/mlocate.db or some other db file. If you want the 'locate' command to give updated information run the command 'updatedb' before running 'locate'.

This updatedb can be added into cron on daily or weekly basis based on convenience. But one problem is that the updetedb command takes little bit time to update the db. So it is better to go with find command. At the same time the find command also not good for whole file system. If you know in advance in some directory the corresponding file might exists,then you can search only in that directory using the find command.

Ex. find some_directory_name -name file_name.

For more information please refer the corresponding man pages. Happy Linuxing...