On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 07:42:57AM +0200, Jussi Peltola wrote: > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 04:54:49AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 05:57:11AM +0200, Jussi Peltola wrote: > > > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 02:35:54AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > > > yeah, but wasn't the original issue that started this thread was that > > > > the locate database was "too old"? maybe if locate, apropos, etc would > > > > print "databse last updated 3 weeks 2 days ago"? > > > > > > This should be done in any case. IMHO it's a bug if they don't complain > > > loudly, or even refuse to run with a stale database. Stale caches are > > > evil, even if the man page warns about them. > > > > yeah, but if your computer hasn't been on for 3 weeks and then locate > > won't work because the database is 3 weeks old, that would suck. > > Of course it would need a switch to force it to run. But I guess a > warning is better since locate might be used in scripts and it's not > good to add extra knobs to existing programs where they don't gain much.
Please, no. If nothing has changed on my machine in 3 weeks (say one of the laptops I use infrequently) I would utterly hate having locate et al. bitch at me continually. If *you* really want something like that, this is what shell functions are for, just check the database mtime, and print to stderr if it's too old, then run locate. Please don't try and force that on everyone else. -0- -- The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets.
