plocate-build(8)

✨ plocate-build(8) — System Manager's Manual ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the plocate-build page, section 8 of your system manager's manual 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

plocate-build — generate index for plocate

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

plocate-build [OPTION]...  MLOCATE_DB PLOCATE_DB

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so here's the tea, bestie 🍓 plocate-build creates an index for plocate(1), built from an index that was generated earlier by updatedb(8) from the mlocate(1) package.

ngl though, most users would way rather just use plocate's own updatedb(8), because that's more direct — it's giving main character energy and skipping the middleman ✨

⚠️ real talk: if PLOCATE_DB already exists, it will be overwritten — and not atomically, so like, no undo button, okay? 😭

one more thing: the file is created such that it is not world-readable, because the final access check is done by plocate(1) during the search. privacy slay 💅

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -b, --block-size SIZE — create blocks containing SIZE filenames each, compress them together, and treat them as the same element in the posting lists. this makes the index smaller (because the compression algorithm gets more context to work with, and because there are fewer elements in each posting list), but it also makes posting lists less precise, moving more work to weeding out false positives after posting list intersection.

making this number larger will make linear search (for --regex, or very short patterns) faster, with diminishing returns around 256 filenames per block. however, making it too large will cause more false positives, reducing overall performance for typical queries. the default value is 32. setting it to 1 makes one (compressed) block per filename 🫶

• -p, --plaintext — treat the input as plain text, with entries delimited by newlines, instead of an mlocate database. simple as that, icon 👑
• -l, --require-visibility FLAG — set the "require file visibility before reporting it" flag in the generated database to FLAG. the default is yes, even for an mlocate database with the flag originally set to no (although the latter may change in the future — so like, don't come for me if it does 🙈)
• --help — print out usage information, then exit successfully. we love a clean exit ✨
• --version — print out version information, then exit successfully. also a clean exit, also iconic 💜

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

Steinar H. Gunderson <steinar+plocate@gunderson.no>

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

plocate(1), /etc/cron.daily/plocate (which is called update-plocate.sh in the source distribution)

and that's the whole page, bestie 🦋 this one's from plocate-build, dated Oct 2020 — go forth and build those indexes, you absolute legend 👑💖