interacting with an updatedb generated data file within python

[John Machin]

On Apr 3, 6:25 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:

> The format appears to be documented e.g.http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/findutils/locatedb.5.html
> and thus should be found on the locatedb(5) man page on your system.

More comprehensive:
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_node/find_html/Database-Formats.html#Database-Formats

> Assuming that you don't have the old version, it should take about 20
> lines of Python to loop around extracting the file names, plus some
> more to open the file, read it in as one big string (how big is it?),
> and check the dummy "LOCATE02" entry up the front -- it's a bit hard
> to be sure how the prefix length of the first non-dummy entry is
> determined without seeing an actual example, but my guess is that the
> file will start like this:
>
> "\x00LOCATE02\x00\xF8name-of-first-file-in-full\x00........."
> where the "\xF8" is -8 meaning ignore the 8-character previous name
> "LOCATE02" i.e. previous name can be regarded as "".

After noticing there was in fact an example, make that:
"\x00LOCATE02\x00\x00name-of-first-file-in-full\x00........."

i.e. you can assert that buffer[:10] == "\x00LOCATE02\x00" and start
the loop from offset 10 with the previous name set to "".

Cheers,
John