On Jan 24 13:32:43, joshua stein wrote: > > Cron runs the weekly update script every Saturday at 3:30am. If you > > use a laptop or other desktop, your computer probably isn't on then. > > So the locate and whatis databases never get updated unless you run it > > by hand. > > > > So somebody should figure out a way to handle this for desktop machines.
So do you mean laptops or desktops? There's a difference; namely, laptops run on batteries, and laptops move around. On my desktop, which is usually down at the daily(8) time, I just run 'sh /etc/daily ; shutdown -h -p now' at the end of the day. On a Sunday, I also put /etc/weekly in there. On my laptop, I do the same, _except_ sometimes shuting down a laptop can mean I have 3 minutes of battery remaining, in which case I obviously do not run daily. Also, am I in my home network where there is nfs:/backup to mount? Run the backups then (via daily.local. Otherwise, don't. The other possibilities I thought of (rc.shutdown, @reboot, other cron job) collide with one of the above. daily(8) puts quite a load on (some of) my systems, and ultimately, I want to decide myself, at the given moment, whether to run it or not. Do I need to shutdown quickly? Do I need to boot up quickly to a not-much-loaded system? Do I walk away for a cup of coffee-that-lasts-exactly-`time sh/etc/daily` anyway? (That would be an example of daily(8) being run at a time completely unrelated to booting, halting, or any other time. How do I say that in cron?) So I do it manualy, because having 'sh /etc/daily' somewhere at the back of my head and typing the 13 chars is less of a burden than introducing things into shutdown/boot/cron in a way I know of.
