mlocate is a new implementation of locate, a tool to find files files anywhere in the filesystem based on their name, using a fixed pattern or a regular expression. Unlike other tools like find(1), locate uses a previously created database to perform the search, allowing queries to execute much faster. This database is updated periodically from cron.

Several implementations of locate exist: the original implementation from GNU's findutils, slocate, and mlocate. The advantages of mlocate are:

* it indexes all the filesystem, but results of a search will only
include files that the user running locate has access to. It does
this by updating the database as root, but making it unreadable for
normal users, who can only access it via the locate binary. slocate
does this as well, but not the original locate.

* instead of re-reading all the contents of all directories each time
the database is updated, mlocate keeps timestamp information in its
database and can know if the contents of a directory changed without
reading them again. This makes updates much faster and less demanding
on the hard drive. This feature is only found in mlocate.