Updatedb - what is it for?

[Tom Adelstein]

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 00:42 +0200, Gábor Iglói wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> My machine sometimes starts to work furiously on the hard drive. So
> I'm curious why. I issued a "top" command and found that the updatedb
> process is working at these times. I haven't meet this thing in
> another distro (maybe it's there too but I didn't noticed it) - so I
> would like to ask: what it is and what it is for? I tried man and
> Google but still not clear what's good in it.
> 

It's a utility to create a flat file database of all the files on a
Linux computer. We used to run this in the early days of package
managers so we could use the facility "locate".

It literally lets you know where something is. For example, if you are
having a hard time installing an application and it says a dependency is
missing, you could run $ locate libxml.so.1 and it might
return /var/lib/libxml.so.1

If you package looks for the library in /usr/lib you could make a
symbolic link in /usr/lib to /var/lib/linxml.so.1 and the package would
probably install.

It's a very useful facility in Linux.