The "database" read by Kpathsea is a line-oriented file of plain
text. The format is that generated by GNU (and most other) ls
programs given the `-R' option, as follows.
For example, here's the first few lines of `ls-R' (which totals about 30K bytes) on my system:
bibtex dvips fonts ls-R metafont metapost tex web2c ./bibtex: bib bst doc ./bibtex/bib: asi.bib btxdoc.bib ...
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