Is it safe to run locate/updatedb on WSL Linux?

Solution 1:

I wouldn't recommend it, just for performance reasons alone, especially if you are running WSL2. WSL1 uses drvfs to access files under Windows, which is still slow than a "native" Linux filesystem, but WSL2 uses 9P, which can be up to 10x slower than WSL1 if you are accessing many small files.

There are some alternatives that are native Windows. I'd probably just deal with having two separate commands/databases to search -- One for WSL/Linux, and the other for Windows drives/files.