[ Thanks to Nobody for this link.
]
“Linux provides users with a find command to search for
files in a directory hierarchy. find allows for several
criteria to be used for matching the files you are interested in,
such as the name, owner, creation, modification and access times,
permissions, size, type of the file and more. You can combine
options using simple boolean expressions such as AND, OR and NOT to
produce a more specific search.”
“While find does an excellent job looking for files with complex
search criteria, for simple tasks of looking up files by name it is
somewhat slow, having to traverse each sub-directory. Most
Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Linux, provide an alternative
to find called locate.”
“The locate utility uses a database to quickly locate the files
you need using patterns. It is significantly faster then using find
due to its indexed database search rather then traversing the file
hierarchy. The index database is typically built every night;
however, the down side of this is not having the ability to search
for recently created files.”