locate

I used to rely on whereis and find to locate programs and files on my debian box, but these weren’t being very helpful when I tried to find a file I new existed on the system. I stumbled across the utility locate after a quick google search. And it did locate that elusive file for me. But only once I had updated it’s database (which it kindly informed was 8 days out of date). To update the locate database, simply log on as root and type:

udpatedb

UPDATE

If you are trying to do something similar on your Mac, the command can be found here (so you might to use the full path):

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb