bigram was formerly used to produce locate databases. code was formerly used to produce locate databases. It is the ancestor of frcode. find searches given directory trees for files matching the specified criteria. frcode is called by updatedb to compress the list of file names. It uses front-compression, reducing the database size by a factor of 4 to 5. locate searches through a database of file names, and reports the names that contain a given string or match a given pattern. updatedb updates the locate database. It scans the entire file system (including other file systems that are currently mounted, unless told not to) and puts every file name it finds in the database. xargs can be used to apply a given command to a list of files.