On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Steven Satelle wrote:
> Isnt there a command call 'locate' which is simalir to find but
> about 1000 times faster (search your entire filesys in about 10
> seconds) which works by examining the filesys every few hours?
> could be this which is running find
Steven and Oswald
Several have commented on this database. The find operation that
occurs about once a day (updatedb) is responsbile for creating the
database that locate uses. That is the find operation that runs in
the background. See man updatedb and man locate.
The locate command can only locate files that the user running
updatedb can see. I find locate to be useful if you make it run with
root priv. Some claim this is an invasion of privacy and a security
hole. This is true on a multiuser system where you cannot assure
that users are all benign.
That is why Debian's default is to run updatedb from /etc/cron.daily
as the user nobody, making locate able to find only files that user
nobody can see. Makes it very nearly a no op, and worth killing, as
some suggest.
HTH, YMMV
--David
David Teague, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian GNU/Linux Because software support is free, timely,
useful, technically accurate, and friendly.
(I hope this is all of the above.)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oswald Buddenhagen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: 25 April 2000 10:04
> To: Mike Cook
> Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: find running in the backgound
>
>
> > Once a day, I hear my hard drive making a lot of noise, so i ran top and
> > discovered it was find running. What is its purpose and how can
> > I disable it?
> >
> it's a cron job. edit /etc/cron.daily/* to get rid of it.
>
> --
> Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please!
> --
> Linux - the last service pack you'll ever need.
