kokatu

kokatu is a POSIX script which works as a wrapper for fd and ripgrep, bringing a similar functionality to mlocate, i.e, it indexes the system files and then allows the user to search in this index.

Requirements

For the base usage of kokatu, you only need to have fd and ripgrep installed. If you want to use compression, you will need to have lz4 in your system.

Usage

To create/update the index with kokatu, you just need to run the script with the option -u. You may be required to run this as root if you don't have read permissions of your user for the files selected by the <start-path>.

To search for an entry, you need to run the script with the pattern you want to search, kokatu <pattern>.

# Create/Update database
$ sudo kokatu -u

# Search for pattern 'README.md'
$ kokatu README.md

Options

The currently supported options are:

• -d <database-path> - It overwrites the default path of the database/index [default: /tmp/kokatu.db]
• -p <start-path> - It overwrites the default start path of the files to index [default: /]
• -u - It updates/creates the database
• -c - Return the number of matches, instead of the matches themselves
• -i - Ignore case when searching
• -v - Verbose

Compression

By default, kokatu doesn't compresses the index, however this can be enabled by changing the following line.

diff --git a/kokatu b/kokatu
--- a/kokatu
+++ b/kokatu
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@

 kokatu_db="/tmp/kokatu.db"

-compression=""
+compression="Y"
 verbose=""

 rg_options="-z"

Performance

The following performance times were measured using hyperfine, with the command:

$ hyperfine --warmup 3 "locate README.md" "kokatu -d /tmp/kokatu.db README.md" "kokatu -d /tmp/kokatu_compressed.db.lz4 README.md"

The conditions of the indexes where the following:

Program	Database Size	Number of entries
mlocate	34M	1122686
kokatu (no compression)	103M	1199505
kokatu (with compression)	15M	1199505

TODO

• Configuration file