Page 165 - DCAP106_OPERATING_SYSTEM_TOOLS

Operating System Tools

Notes 5. ...................................... is a special file system which doesn’t exist on a device, but is a sort of
gateway to the Linux kernel.
6. ...................................... is a pseudo file system which contains device files used for terminal
emulation.
7. A SATA disk driver internally uses the ...................................... layer to represent and access
data.
8. If you ever need to remove a medium from the file system, use the......................................
command.
9. The ...................................... file system is the parent of the entire file system.

9.3 File Search Utilities

Mostly, the file you want to locate is inside your home directory. However, sometimes you
want to locate a particular file somewhere on your whole system. Fortunately, there are a few
commands at your disposal to do so.

9.3.1 Locate Command

This command is used to manage and use a database of files. This will assist you to find a
particular file. Before using this command, you first need to install it (the package is called sys-
apps/mlocate) and then create the file database. Also, this database is not automatically brought
up to date while you modify your system, so you’ll need to run this command (which is the same
for creating a new database or updating an existing one) every now and then:

# updated
We can keep this database up to date by using the system scheduler (known as cron). When your
database is build and somewhat up to date, you can locate any particular file on your filesystem
using locate.

Example:
# locate make.conf
/etc/portage/make.conf
(...)
/usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf
It can be seen that the locate command returns all files it has found where the string (in this case,
“make.conf”) is used in the filename, even when the file name is different.

Notes The name mlocate is the name of the project that maintains the package. In earlier
days, the package of choice for the locate functionality was slocate.

9.3.2 Find Command

This command is considered as a very significant and powerful command which, unlike
locate,. only returns live information. Thus, a database is not used. This makes searches
with find somewhat slow, but find’s power isn’t speed, but the options you can give to find a
particular file.

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