Make Searching Easy

After installing everything, the first thing I like to do is:

touch /var/lib/slocate/slocate.db

This creates a search database. It's empty, so the next thing I do is

updatedb&

This updates your search database. It makes it very easy to find things with the slocate command. Now, whenever you want to find something on your computer, you can use:

slocate name of what you are looking for

This also sets up the search feature in Gnome. I use it all the time. Slackware is also set by default to update your database once a day. Don't forget to manually update the database with the updatedb& command if you do a bunch of updates and want to look for the newly installed files right away. If you use slocate from the command line, it's important to remember that the results are from the most recent database. It may show you files that no longer exist and leave out files that do exist if you haven't updated your database since the changes. The Gnome search tool will not give you false positives, though, as it checks to make sure that the files actually still exist before giving you your results.

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