[mactropolis]

hello,
i would like to know why the 'user.cs_path' variable isn't changable? The reason i want to change it is because the 'whereis'
command check user.cs_path to search for stuff. but i would ilke to add other locations to the 'whereis' search path,
which means i'd have to be able to edit 'user.cs_path', but as you can see if you check 'man sysctl', user.cs_path is not
changeable. so how can i get around this little problem?

[Kickaha]

Isn't 'locate' the preferred way of doing this?

'man whereis':
HISTORY
The whereis command appeared in 3.0BSD.

'man locate':
HISTORY
The locate command appears in 4.4BSD.

[mactropolis]

i'm not familiar with locate, but I did find the gutz to divulge into kriptic *NIX man files and read about locate. unfortunately, i don't understand the man file on locate. what is it referring to as a pattern? so can you (in common english), tell me the syntax to use the locate command?


what i want is a utility that i can do '<util> halt', and it will report '/sbin/halt'. to do this, you can use either the 'whereis' command or 'which'. the problem i'm having is that i want to expand the search capability of either whereis or which. anyone know how? what shell variables do i have to edit since 'which' is a shell built-in command?

[ 07-03-2001: Message edited by: mactropolis ]

[Kickaha]

Ummm... 'locate <string>'

man locate gives:

LOCATE(1) System Reference Manual LOCATE(1)

NAME
locate - find files

SYNOPSIS
locate pattern

DESCRIPTION
locate searches a database for all pathnames which match the specified
pattern. The database is recomputed periodically, and contains the path-names of all files which are publicly accessible.

Shell globbing and quoting characters (``*'', ``?'', ``\'', ``['' and
``]'') may be used in pattern, although they will have to be escaped from the shell. Preceding any character with a backslash (``\'') eliminates any special meaning which it may have. The matching differs in that no characters must be matched explicitly, including slashes (``/'').

As a special case, a pattern containing no globbing characters (``foo'') is matched as though it were ``*foo*''.

FILES
/var/db/locate.database Database
/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb Script to update database.

SEE ALSO
find(1), fnmatch(3), weekly.conf(5)

Woods, James A., "Finding Files Fast", ;login, 8:1, pp. 8-10, 1983.

HISTORY
The locate command appears in 4.4BSD.

BSD Experimental June 6, 1993

Which is about the simplest man page I've ever seen.

On second look, maybe this *isn't* what you need, since it gives you every file on the system whose name contains the pattern, and not just apps.

[howardm4]

The three methods:

1. 'which <prog>' - given the current value of $PATH, walk each path
element and report back which is the first one to match. This is the one
which would be executed.

2. 'whereis <prog>' - given a predefined set of subdirectories, walk each one and report back ALL of the matches.

3. 'locate <pattern>' - given a binary database rooted at some point in
the filesystem (/ usually), essentially 'egrep' the database looking for a pattern match. The database is usually re-created via cron and can take a while to generate.

You could also get GNU fileutils and get a more reasonable version of
whereis (I think it's in fileutils).