slocate

slocate [-i] [-r] [-n num] [options] pattern

slocate (Secure Locate) is a permission-aware version of the locate command that searches a pre-built database of file paths. Unlike standard locate, slocate only returns files that the searching user has permission to access, preventing information disclosure about file structures in restricted directories.The tool maintains a database indexed by file path, providing near-instant search results compared to real-time filesystem traversal with find. The database is typically updated periodically via cron, and supports both glob-style patterns and regular expressions for flexible matching.slocate has been largely superseded by mlocate, which uses a more efficient database format and is the default on most modern Linux distributions. Both provide the same security-aware behavior of filtering results based on the caller's file permissions.

-i

Case insensitive.

Update database.

Statistics.

Limit results.

Regex pattern.

Exclude directory.

Database may be stale. Root for update. Superseded by mlocate.

slocate (Secure Locate) was created by Kevin Lindsay to address security concerns with the original GNU locate, which could leak information about restricted files. It has been largely replaced by mlocate on modern Linux distributions.

locate(1), mlocate(1), find(1), updatedb(1)