Very Computer

There's a weird program running in the background once in a while called
"find". Something calls it automatically. What is it, why do I need it
(my distribution is Mandrake 7.0) and if I don't then how do stop it
from being launched automatically?

Wroot

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Greetings:
  You may not want to stop this!  Check out "crontab" via your man pages!
Type in the command as "root" user "crontab -l root".  This will list out
scheduled system cleanup tasks that you may have running during those times!

Hope this helps,
Daniel W. Erskine

RedHat and Mandrake don't have the cron jobs in the crontab.  Look in
/etc/cron.d for what gets launched and /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.weekly
/etc/cron.hourly and so on.

Every day at 4:02 am it should be updating your files database so you
can use 'locate <filename>' to find anything on your disk rather than
searching your disk every time you want to find a file.

Dan
--
UNIX - Not just for vestal *s anymore
Linux - Choice of a GNU generation

Quote:> There's a weird program running in the background once in a while called
> "find". Something calls it automatically. What is it, why do I need it
> (my distribution is Mandrake 7.0) and if I don't then how do stop it
> from being launched automatically?

It's likely being used to update the locatedb. This is a database of
files on your system which is used by the 'locate' command (see man locate
for details). It is run by a program called 'cron'. Which is a very
useful program indeed. See man cron for details. Is there a manual on
the GPL Mandrake CD? (I assume you have an el-cheapo GPL one since, to
my knowledge, the boxed version was only released on the fifth). The
manual ought to give the gorey details of modifying cron jobs. Also see
man cron. But you shouldn't remove this job.

--
There is no sig.
Ewan Dunbar

Quote:> There's a weird program running in the background once in a while called
> "find". Something calls it automatically. What is it, why do I need it
> (my distribution is Mandrake 7.0) and if I don't then how do stop it
> from being launched automatically?

Cron runs find regularely to help clean up the system, and keep it clean.
What find does is scan through a directory structure, returning the names of
every file in it. It can also be used to search on things other than name,
like time last modified. Find is VERY versatile, and can even fork another
process to deal with its output.

One of the main cron uses is rotate logs when they reach a certain size, and
delete files in /tmp when they reach a certain age.

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