The motivation for tlocate was to provide a secure and powerful alternative to the GNU locate program. In addition, tlocate does not allow a user to get information about a file that they would not normally be able to obtain. Currently, tlocate only works with version 4 databases. These are generated by tripwire 1.2 and 1.3.1. They may be generated by other versions of tripwire, but it has not been tested with them.
Versions are also available as part of some linux distributions.
If the database ends in the suffix .gz, then tlocate will attempt to open it as a gzip file. The expression is a perl style regular expression which will be applied to all file names and paths. ALL files in the database that the user is allowd to see. When options are specified, ONLY files that match ALL options are output. This is acomplished by computing a one way hash of the file and searching for all files with the same hash.