When comparing Tracker vs locate, the Slant community recommends locate for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop search tools for Linux?” locate is ranked 1st while Tracker is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose locate is:
locate updates its database usually daily and from there it can retrieve matching file names almost instantly.
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Pros
Pro Can be found in official repos for many distros
Tracker is easily available in official repositories for several popular distros.
Pro Near instant file name matching
locate updates its database usually daily and from there it can retrieve matching file names almost instantly.
Pro Installed by default on most distributions
The "locate" command is probably already installed and setup on your Linux. Just run it.
Pro Regexp option
Uses the extended POSIX regex.
Cons
Con UI functionality is limited
There are very few user interfaces available for tracker.
Con Cannot search inside files' content
Locate only search by file name and has no knowledge of their content. Yet it can be mixed together with tools like xargs
and grep
to look inside content of possibly relevant files quickly.