makewhatis / updatedb

[Rick Stevens]

Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 09:37:16AM -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
>><snip>
>>
>>makewhatis and updatedb have nothing to do with each other.  makewhatis
>>generates the database for the "man -k" or "appropos" commands, updatedb
>>generates the database for the "which" and "whereis" commands.
> 
> 
> Umm, if I may dare correct our otherwise duly esteemed guru, updatedb
> generates the database for the "locate" command.  "which" merely looks
> for a command in your $PATH, and "whereis" (according to the man page)
> looks in a few hardwired places for the binary, man page, and source
> for something.  If either of them use the locate database, it's not
> well documented.

You are quite correct.  I forgot that I've aliased a number of my
commands and whereis actually runs the original whereis followed by an
slocate if whereis doesn't come up with anything.

The scientific word for my error is "Doh!" :-p

>>>What can cause updatedb to continue running and not finish? Could it be
>>>the NFS filesystems? They've been mounted for months with no problems.
>>
>>It could be.  You may have a recursive directory loop or something in
>>there.
>>
>>It depends on what changed on the filesystems it's checking.  You may
>>need to use the "-e" option to exclude certain directories or the "-f"
>>option to exclude filesytem types, e.g.
>>
>>	updatedb -f nfs
>>
>>to exclude NFS volumes.
> 
> 
> My system (up to FC1, now) has a default /etc/updatedb.conf which
> says:
> 
> PRUNEFS="devpts NFS nfs afs sfs proc smbfs autofs auto iso9660"
> PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs /net /sfs" 
> export PRUNEFS
> export PRUNEPATHS
> 
> which, I think, excludes NFS mounts by default.  No?

It would provided you modified the /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron file
to use the environment variables.  My file has the exclusions hard-coded
in it as "-e" and "-f" options.

Technically, updatedb is a symlink to slocate.  slocate, if called as 
updatedb, assumes the "-u" flag.  If you want it to read the
/etc/updatedb.conf file, it must also be passed the "-c" flag.  On top
of that, the format of the "-f" and "-e" options are comma-separated,
not space-separated.  Unless slocate reads those specific environment
variables, my guess is that that file is just noise.

A quick run through man, info and the slocate README reveals nothing
about that, nor is there anything on the proper format of
/etc/updatedb.conf--which is just a shell script that exports some
variables.

> I'm sorry.  I've done nothing to explain Karl's anomoly.

Neither do I.  Perhaps a run of updatedb with the "-v" flag might
reveal what's going on:

	/usr/bin/updatedb -v -f "nfs,smbfs,ncpfs,proc,devpts" -e \
	"/tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/tmp,/afs,/net"

>>-              Careful!  Ugly strikes 9 out of 10 people!            -
> 
> And senility gets the rest of us. :-)

I'm sure I could come up with a snappy rejoinder, but I just can't
remember who the hell you are!  ;-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      A day for firm decisions!!!   Well, then again, maybe not!    -
----------------------------------------------------------------------