How can I limit locate command to search current directory?

Question

Locate search is not limitable to current directory:

I am trying to learn so I decided to write this script

cd /usr/share/doc && ls -R | grep "\.html" | sudo tee htmldoclist.txt

Then I want to pipe the doc list into locate command similar to

locate $(head -n 1 htmldoclist.txt)

but I want to use cat.

I want to save the output of this to hlinks.txt and use sed to append file:// to line starts with pipe to sed as follows:

| sed -e 's/^/file:///g'

I expect to create a bunch of terminal hyperlinks for my documentation files stored in /usr/share/docs

And what is the exact problem, what are you not able to resolve? — Eduardo Trápani, Jan 29 '20 at 22:14
locate command is not searching within current directory thus it is very slow I tried the -P option too. and dirname $(ls -R /usr/share/doc | grep ".html") — noob_sabidiot, Jan 29 '20 at 22:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 30 '20 at 00:28

1

It looks like find would be more appropriate for the task, it will give your the list of files and filter them and then you can use sed:

find /usr/share/doc -iname '*html' | sed  's|^|file://|'

But find does a lot more, it can also format the output for you:

find /usr/share/doc -iname '*html' -printf 'file://%p\n'

edited Jan 30 '20 at 00:28

answered Jan 29 '20 at 22:46

Eduardo Trápani

Thank you very much! Worked much better and creates clickable links Ctrl click. – noob_sabidiot Jan 29 '20 at 23:17
@noob_sabidiot please accept the answer if it worked for you. That's how the system works. – Eduardo Trápani Jan 29 '20 at 23:19
find /usr/share/doc -iname '*html' -printf 'file://%p\n' | less – noob_sabidiot Jan 29 '20 at 23:26
Now to make an alias docs="`find /usr/share/doc -iname '*html' -printf 'file://%p\n'`" – noob_sabidiot Jan 29 '20 at 23:27

1 Answers1