~adeodato/ blog/ mlocate, a better locate

mlocate, a better locate

Looking purely by chance at the front package of Freshmeat the other day, I discovered mlocate, a new implementation of locate whose main feature is that it reuses the existing updatedb database when creating a new one, which makes updatedb faster and less intensive on the hard drive. (I suppose it stores an mtime of each directory, and only re-reads directory contents if the filesystem is newer.)

As with slocate, mlocate’s updatedb is meant to be run as root, and the created database is mode 0640 root:mlocate, with the locate binary being setgid mlocate then.

After some discussion in debian-devel, it was decided that mlocate was suitable for Priority: standard, once findutils’ locate was split out to a separate pakcage. So, give it a go.