How come the locate command doesn't find obvious files?
updatedb
only runs once a day, you need to run it with root privileges to find recent files.
If you are not able to locate
a file that obviously exists
I see only two possibilities:
The file (directory) was created after the last time that the database of locate was updated. By default it is updated once in a day (
/etc/cron.daily/mlocate
).
With enough privilege you can fix it forcing an update withsudo updatedb
The file (directory) was created under a path not scanned by updatedb (case more rare): you can find the keys of the pruned files in the configuration file
/etc/updatedb.conf
. Search for PRUNENAMES, PRUNEPATHS or PRUNEFS and modify consequently, then update again the database.sudo pico /etc/updatedb.conf sudo updatedb
Of course even without privilege you can still search for the file, for example scanning all the directories and subdirectories starting from a position with something like
find . -name '*ipsec.secrets*' # to start from the current directory
find / -name '*ipsec.secrets*' # to start from the root # long long
Note that whereis
has a hard-coded path (where to search for), so may not always find what you're looking for.