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Looks like it's not configurable through /etc/updatedb.conf, and not mentioned in its manual as well.

So can I change that?

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Which distrib? What have you tried? Did you read /usr/share/doc? –  F. Hauri Jan 12 '13 at 13:43
@F.Hauri only read man update.conf –  warl0ck Jan 12 '13 at 14:12

1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted

You should probably know that mlocate only does queries on the databases created by updatedb. If you want to change the default location of the databases created by updatedb you should pass the --output FILE option to updatedb and then do the query with locate --database FILE afterwards.

You could do:

$ sudo updatedb -o /var/db/foo.db
$ locate -d /var/db/foo.db something
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