A.15. Findutils

A.15.1. Official Download Location

Findutils (4.1.20):
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/findutils/

A.15.2. Contents of Findutils

The Findutils package contains programs to find files, either on-the-fly (by doing a live recursive search through directories and only showing files that match the specifications) or by searching through a database.

Installed programs: bigram, code, find, frcode, locate, updatedb and xargs

A.15.3.

A.15.4. Short descriptions

bigram was formerly used to produce locate databases.

code was formerly used to produce locate databases. It is the ancestor of frcode.

find searches given directory trees for files matching the specified criteria.

frcode is called by updatedb to compress the list of file names. It uses front-compression, reducing the database size by a factor of 4 to 5.

locate searches through a database of file names, and reports the names that contain a given string or match a given pattern.

updatedb updates the locate database. It scans the entire filesystem (including other filesystems that are currently mounted, unless told not to) and puts every file name it finds in the database.

xargs can be used to apply a given command to a list of files.

A.15.5.

A.15.6. Findutils Installation Dependencies

Findutils depends on: Bash, Binutils, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Sed.