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Accepted
rubo77
Asked: 2012-12-02 03:07:44 +0800 CST

where is the updatedb database located?

  • 772

I would like to remove with purge all entries of locate and its database.

I tried 

apt-get purge locate

and 

rm /etc/updatedb*

But is the database gone also?
Where is the updatedb database located on debian squeeze?

I would like to delete it manually too, so I can cleanly reinstall it

linux

6 Answers

  1. man updatedb

    search for 'FILES'

    mine says:

    FILES
       /etc/updatedb.conf
              A configuration file.  See updatedb.conf(5).

       /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db
              The database updated by default.
    • 15

  2. No need to decompile the executable! Just kindly ask 'locate' :-)

    For updatedb/locate (GNU findutils) version 4.6.0 try calling

    locate --statistics

    For me (on cygwin) this yields someting like

    Database /var/locatedb is in the GNU LOCATE02 format.
Database was last modified at 2017:03:13 22:44:31.849172100 +0100
Locate database size: 6101081 bytes
All Filenames: 202075
File names have a cumulative length of 22094021 bytes.
Of those file names,

    2591 contain whitespace,
    0 contain newline characters,
    and 20 contain characters with the high bit set.
Compression ratio 72.39% (higher is better)
    • 15
  3. Best Answer

    On debian, the locate database is stored by default in 

    /var/cache/locate/locatedb

    If you use mlocate as search indexer:

    The mlocate database is stored at 

    /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db

    see: How can I view updatedb database content, and then exclude certain files/paths?

    • 11

  4. I prefer to just strace the process, as it's going to lead you right there. This will be distribution agnostic and works if you don't have the man pages.

    # strace updatedb 2>&1 |grep ^open|grep db

open("/etc/updatedb.conf", O_RDONLY)    = 3
open("/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db", O_RDWR) = 3
open("/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.bUUaw4", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = 4
    • 7

  5. [REDACTED in 2017]: See above answer: locate --statistics works.

    If you have an /etc/updatedb.conf, you can look in there. I don't. You can read the man page for locate, which says the default location is /var/cache/locate/locatedb. Mine isn't there. You can use locate itself to search for files named "updatedb" or "locatedb". I'm using Cygwin on Windows 7.

    • 2

  6. on mac --statistics is invalid

    man locate

    FILES /var/db/locate.database locate database

    • 0