We have covered which, whereis, and find. You might have noticed that find can take a while to execute, due to the fact that it needs to read each directory that it's searching. It turns out that the locate command can speed things up by relying on an external database.

The locate command matches against any part of a pathname, not just the file itself. For example:

$ locate bin/ls
/var/ftp/bin/ls
/bin/ls
/sbin/lsmod
/sbin/lspci
/usr/bin/lsattr
/usr/bin/lspgpot
/usr/sbin/lsof