What is the crowd's opinion of mlocate?

From 3.5 billion comments

using locate instead of find would be almost instant but idk if macs come with mlocate/etc installed by default.

everyone should know about mlocate

locate does:

$ locate idonotexist $ echo $? 1

From the locate manpage:

> EXIT STATUS > locate exits with status 0 if any match was found or if locate was > invoked with one of the --limit 0, --help, --statistics or --version > options. If no match was found or a fatal error was encountered, > locate exits with status 1.

At least for mlocate, which is the default on my Debian system.

The other responses explain it quite well.

Just to add. If you find that updatedb takes several minutes every time you run it, try installing mlocate.

Here is a comparison.

AFAIK it's the default in Ubuntu. For openSUSE you can find it here.