Which find command is best?

[Ben2040]

Hi
(I hope this is in the right catagory)
I have just used find, which was new to me, and previously I used locate or whereis, and all three have returned different results!! Whats the difference and which is the best?

Ben

[dgt84]

I personally prefer locate, but you need to updatedb very often so that the database is up to speed. Try running updatedb, then run locate, slocate, find, etc... they should all return the same results. I don't know too much about whereis, use it occaisionally to find executables...
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[bokkepoot]

whereis uses a hardcoded path to search for commands and manpages etc.
(s)locate uses a (prebuilt) database to search for files, which may or may not include the directory your 'wanted' file resides in
find traverses a user given path on a live filesystem to search for the requested files.

So it all depends on what file you are looking for, if its a file that is likely to be in default system path, whereis works probably best, if its eg. a truetype font slocate will be your best shot, if its about files in directories updatedb (used for creating the slocate db) probably won't update, like nfs or user-homes, find will do the trick.. It all depends where you think it might be.

[Yarrick]

'which' can also be useful

[zephyr1256]

'which' is my favorite command for finding binary executables. It has become most indispensible as of late while I'm working on a basic Linux system on a pair of floppy disks. I need to find out dependencies, etc, for a binary, and I can just do something like:

[Genone]

Short answer:
- which is for finding executables
- whereis is for finding manpages, libraries, headerfiles and excutables
- locate is for all files, but it often finds way too much files, a custom find-command is better