[NTLUG:Discuss] What is this?

[Hanna, Mark]

if you look in /etc/cron.daily or cron.weekly, you should find the
slocate.cron script.  slocate is a security enhanced version of locate.
updatedb updates a database of all of the files in your system.  The
"-f" argument means ignore Filesystems of those types and the "-e"
argument means Exclude any files under those directories.  I'll bet that
the awk is a child process to the updatedb.

are you familar with reading the processid and parentprocessid columns
from the ps command?  that is usually a pretty good way of tracing what
process is running what.

you are also correct in that this process is probably running now
because the system was off during it's usual runtime.  Most flavors of
linux default to installing anacron now and anacron is different from
regular "old skool" cron in that it will re-run processes that did not
run due to system outage.

in general, it will not hurt anything to leave this process running and
is somethign you want to run every so often.

HTH,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Dahl [mailto:w.dahl4 at verizon.net]
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 12:25 PM
To: NTLUG
Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] What is this?


Something is going on with this system that I don't know and would like
to know if this is a problem or not.  Occasionally, if I check running
processes, I see awk, slocate.cron and updatedb running and don't know
why.  The contents of slocate.cron is given below...

#!/bin/sh
renice +19 -p $$ >/dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/updatedb -f "nfs,smbfs,ncpfs,proc,devpts" -e 
"/tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/tmp,/afs,/net"

The fourth line was wrapped, so there are only 3 lines to it.  What
exactly is this doing?  I'm not a programmer and probably never will be,
but when I see processes running that I don't know about and didn't
initiate (I understand the idea behind cron and hope this is just
something running as it gets the opportunity because this computer stays
turned off most of the time).

Thanks for any input you can give.

-- 
Wayne Dahl
Registered Linux User # 347549
No electrons were abused in any way by any Micro$oft 
product in the composition of this e-mail.


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