lfs-book/appendixa/findutils-desc.xml

<sect2><title>Contents of Findutils</title>

<para>Last checked against version &findutils-contversion;.</para>

<sect3><title>Program Files</title>
<para>bigram, code, find, frcode, locate, updatedb and
xargs</para></sect3>

<sect3><title>Descriptions</title>

<sect4><title>bigram</title>
<para>bigram is used together with code to produce older-style locate 
databases. To learn more about these last three programs, read the locatedb.5 
manual page.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>code</title>
<para>code is the ancestor of frcode. It was used in older-style locate 
databases.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>find</title>
<para>The find program searches for files in a directory hierarchy which match
a certain criteria. If no criteria is given, it lists all files in the
current directory and its subdirectories.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>frcode</title>
<para>frcode is called by updatedb to compress the list of file names
using front-compression, which reduces the database size by a factor of
4 to 5.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>locate</title>
<para>locate scans a database which contains all files and directories on a
filesystem. This program lists the files and directories in this
database matching a certain criteria. If a user is looking for a file this
program will scan the database and tell him exactly where the files he
requested are located. This only makes sense if the locate database is
fairly up-to-date, else it will provide out-of-date information.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>updatedb</title>
<para>The updatedb program updates the locate database. It scans the entire
file system (including other file systems that are currently mounted
unless it is told not to do so) and puts every directory and file it finds
into the database that's used by the locate program, which retrieves this
information. It's good practice to update this database once a day to
have it up-to-date whenever it is needed.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>xargs</title>
<para>The xargs command applies a command to a list of files. If there is 
a need to perform the same command on multiple files, a list can be created 
that names all those files (one per line) and xargs can perform that
command on those files.</para></sect4>

</sect3>

</sect2>