The tools supplied with this package are find, locate, updatedb, and xargs.

The find program searches a directory tree to find a file or group of files. It traverses the directory tree and reports all occurrences of a file matching the user's specifications. The find program includes very powerful searching capability.

The locate program scans one or more databases of filenames and displays any matches. This can be used as a very fast find command if the file was present during the last file name database update.

The updatedb program updates the file name database used by the locate program. The file name database contains lists of files that were in particular directory trees when the databases were last updated. This is usually run nightly by the cron system daemon.

The xargs program builds and executes command lines by gathering together arguments it reads on the standard input. Most often, these arguments are lists of file names generated by find.