Solaris

Does Solaris 10 have an equivalent to FreeBSD's `locate'?

If not, what is the best way to search for files (allowing regexp) throughout the system?

Looks like that is a command specific to FreeBSD - you can use one of the following as replacements.

find
which
whereis

I think that's not only a FreeBSD command, as far as I know, it's part of GNU Findutils. It's also available in most Linux dists. You can download a solaris binary version from sunfreeware.
The main difference between find/which/whereis and locate is how it works. Basically, locate uses a database previously generated by the user or a cron job with the command "updatedb".
Regards.

A pretty good way of doing find is by actually disabling it! hear me out.

Only allow root to use it. Take a full listing of the entire server and stick it into a file. And do this once per week, stick it in cron. That way you only have 'find' run once a week. All users of the system can then search through the file for the find, they can simply grep it out. It is MUCH better on the system. 'find' is resource intensive. Your system will run much smoother if you know you have a lot of users constantly looking for files.

If once a week aint good enough, try it twice accordingly to your environment.

-Sowser

In that case why not just grep /var/sadm/install/contents?

thats a good idea too...but i am not answering the question really.

I am just giving some extra info. Sometimes, you are not just looking for commands. You are looking for a file.

ex.
if you have a server with over 2 million files that are unique, then you can just pump that listing to a file and search that 1 file.

but your right, you can check the install directory for system commands.

-Sowser