locate together with find

Question

I want to take all files from the current directory and give them to "locate" to check if they are elsewhere. So I started with

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "libd*" -exec locate {} ';'

But this does not work because find returns the names in a form like "./libdrm.so" and locate does not work with the leading dot. So I thought locate -b should help:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "libd*" -exec locate -b {} ';'

Unfortunately, locate -b ./libdrm.so does not work, I regard this as a bug. So I tried it with basename:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "libd*" -exec locate \`basename {}\` ';'

This does not work either because `basename {}` is resolved first and the result is "-exec locate '{}' ';'".

Any idea how I can pass "locate `basename {}`" to the exec?

Answer 1

Since you only want to search for files in the actual folder you also could use

locate libd*

or something like as follows, but does not make much sense.

ls libd* | xargs locate
locate $(ls libd*)

If you want to use find, you also could use * instead of ., but I also would quote the {}.

find * -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" -exec locate "{}" ';'

Lastly, if you want to include dot-files, aka hidden files with glob.

shopt -s dotglob
find * -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" -exec locate "{}" ';'
shopt -u dotglob

Answer 2

I would suggest either

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" -exec sh -c 'for f; do locate "${f##*/}"; done' sh {} +

or

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" -printf '%f\0' | while read -rd '' f; do locate "$f"; done

Answer 3

This works for me:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "libd*" | sed -r 's/^\.\///' | xargs locate

sed -r 's/^\.\///': removes the ./ from the find command

Answer 4

find -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" | sed 's^\./^^' | locate -

This solution for sure is not elegant, but it works for me – sed 's^\./^^' simply deletes “./” from the beginning of each line.

If you want to use multiple command in -exec, do it this way:

find -maxdepth 1 -name "libd*" -exec bash -c 'basename $1 | locate -' {} \;