LOCATEDB(5)							File Formats Manual						       LOCATEDB(5)

NAME

       locatedb - front-compressed file name database

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents the format of file name databases for the GNU version of locate.  The file name databases contain lists of files
       that were in particular directory trees when the databases were last updated.

       There can be multiple databases.  Users can select which databases locate searches using an environment variable or  command  line  option;
       see  locate(1).	 The  system  administrator  can  choose the file name of the default database, the frequency with which the databases are
       updated, and the directories for which they contain entries.  Normally, file name databases are updated by  running  the  updatedb  program
       periodically, typically nightly; see updatedb(1).

GNU LOCATE02 database format
       This  is  the  default format of databases produced by updatedb.  The updatedb program runs frcode to compress the list of file names using
       front-compression, which reduces the database size by a factor of 4 to 5.  Front-compression (also known as incremental encoding) works	as
       follows.

       The  database  entries  are  a sorted list (case-insensitively, for users' convenience).  Since the list is sorted, each entry is likely to
       share a prefix (initial string) with the previous entry.  Each database entry begins with an signed offset-differential count  byte,  which
       is  the	additional number of characters of prefix of the preceding entry to use beyond the number that the preceding entry is using of its
       predecessor.  (The counts can be negative.)  Following the count is a null-terminated ASCII remainder -- the part of the name that  follows
       the shared prefix.

       If  the offset-differential count is larger than can be stored in a signed byte (+/-127), the byte has the value 0x80 (binary 10000000) and
       the actual count follows in a 2-byte word, with the high byte first (network byte order).  This count can also be negative  (the  sign  bit
       being in the first of the two bytes).

       Every  database	begins	with  a dummy entry for a file called `LOCATE02', which locate checks for to ensure that the database file has the
       correct format; it ignores the entry in doing the search.

       Databases can not be concatenated together, even if the first (dummy) entry is trimmed from all but the first database.	 This  is  because
       the offset-differential count in the first entry of the second and following databases will be wrong.

       In the future, the data within the locate database may not be sorted in any particular order.  To obtain sorted results, pipe the output of
       locate through sort -f.

slocate database format
       The slocate program uses a database format similar to, but not quite the same as, GNU locate.  The first byte of the database specifies its
       security  level.   If the security level is 0, slocate will read, match and print filenames on the basis of the information in the database
       only.  However, if the security level byte is 1, slocate omits entries from its output if the invoking user is unable to access them.   The
       second byte of the database is zero.  The second byte is followed by the first database entry.  The first entry in the database is not pre-
       ceded by any differential count or dummy entry.	Instead the differential count for the first item is assumed to be zero.

       Starting with the second entry (if any) in the database, data is interpreted as for the GNU LOCATE02 format.

Old Locate Database format
       There is also an old database format, used by Unix locate and find programs and earlier releases of the GNU ones.  updatedb  runs  programs
       called  bigram and code to produce old-format databases.  The old format differs from the above description in the following ways.  Instead
       of each entry starting with an offset-differential count byte and ending with a null, byte values from 0 through 28 indicate offset-differ-
       ential  counts  from  -14 through 14.  The byte value indicating that a long offset-differential count follows is 0x1e (30), not 0x80.  The
       long counts are stored in host byte order, which is not necessarily network byte order, and host integer word  size,  which  is	usually  4
       bytes.	They  also represent a count 14 less than their value.	The database lines have no termination byte; the start of the next line is
       indicated by its first byte having a value <= 30.

       In addition, instead of starting with a dummy entry, the old database format starts with a 256 byte table containing the  128  most  common
       bigrams	in  the  file list.  A bigram is a pair of adjacent bytes.  Bytes in the database that have the high bit set are indexes (with the
       high bit cleared) into the bigram table.  The bigram and offset-differential count coding makes these databases 20-25% smaller than the new
       format,	but makes them not 8-bit clean.  Any byte in a file name that is in the ranges used for the special codes is replaced in the data-
       base by a question mark, which not coincidentally is the shell wildcard to match a single character.

EXAMPLE

       Input to frcode:
       /usr/src
       /usr/src/cmd/aardvark.c
       /usr/src/cmd/armadillo.c
       /usr/tmp/zoo

       Length of the longest prefix of the preceding entry to share:
       0 /usr/src
       8 /cmd/aardvark.c
       14 rmadillo.c
       5 tmp/zoo

       Output from frcode, with trailing nulls changed to newlines and count bytes made printable:
       0 LOCATE02
       0 /usr/src
       8 /cmd/aardvark.c
       6 rmadillo.c
       -9 tmp/zoo

       (6 = 14 - 8, and -9 = 5 - 14)

SEE ALSO

       find(1), locate(1), locatedb(5), xargs(1), Finding Files (on-line in Info, or printed)

BUGS

       The best way to report a bug is to use the form at http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils.  The reason for this  is  that  you  will
       then  be  able  to track progress in fixing the problem.   Other comments about locate(1) and about the findutils package in general can be
       sent to the bug-findutils mailing list.	To join the list, send email to bug-findutils-request@gnu.org.

																       LOCATEDB(5)