updatedb runs a program called frcode to
front-compress the list of file names, which reduces the database
size by a factor of 4 to 5. Front-compression (also known as
incremental encoding) works as follows.
The database entries are a sorted list (case-insensitively, for users' convenience). Since the list is sorted, each entry is likely to share a prefix (initial string) with the previous entry. Each database entry begins with an offset-differential count byte, which is the additional number of characters of prefix of the preceding entry to use beyond the number that the preceding entry is using of its predecessor. (The counts can be negative.) Following the count is a null-terminated ASCII remainder—the part of the name that follows the shared prefix.
If the offset-differential count is larger than can be stored in a byte (+/-127), the byte has the value 0x80 and the count follows in a 2-byte word, with the high byte first (network byte order).
Every database begins with a dummy entry for a file called
LOCATE02, which locate checks for to ensure that the
database file has the correct format; it ignores the entry in doing the
search.
Databases can not be concatenated together, even if the first (dummy) entry is trimmed from all but the first database. This is because the offset-differential count in the first entry of the second and following databases will be wrong.
In the output of locate --statistics, the new database format is referred to as LOCATE02.