What Does Linux Locate Do?

locate is a Unix utility which serves to find files on filesystems. It searches through a prebuilt database of files generated by the updatedb command or by a daemon and compressed using incremental encoding. It operates significantly faster than find , but requires regular updating of the database.

What is difference between find and locate in Linux?

locate simply looks its database and reports the file location. find does not use a database, it traverses all the directories and their sub directories and looks for files matching the given criterion.

How does Linux find work?

Grep is a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters in a specified file. The text search pattern is called a regular expression. When it finds a match, it prints the line with the result. The grep command is handy when searching through large log files.