locate output directory dependant…?

Question

when in home directory and type locate *.cpp I get hundreds of results. using the same command in (for example) ~/../forfun/netstream/ gets me a dozen results. how's that possible?

Answer 1

locate is a database-based finding method. It's damned fast but it's not thorough. I'd suggest using find which is comparatively a lot slower, but can do what you're after:

find /home/forfun/netstream/ -name '*.cpp'

Alternatively if you're happy with the output of locate but just want to trim it down, you can always pipe it through grep:

locate '*.cpp' | grep 'forfun/netstream'

Answer 2

If you run locate *.cpp in the shell the shell will first try to expand *.cpp to all file names matching that pattern and then call locate with this file names as argument.

So if there are any .cpp files in your current directory locate will never see the *.cpp but only the file names it expands to.

Use

locate '*.cpp'

if you don't want the shell to try to expand the pattern.