phantom files

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 16:02 -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
> I recently installed logwatch which in turn installed postfix. Later I 
> decided to uninstall them using "apt-get purge" and "apt-get autoremove". 
> Afterward I ran "locate logwatch" and "locate postfix" and a ton of files 
> showed up, mostly /usr/share/man/man8/ files, /var/lib/dpkg/info/ files, 
> with some /usr/lib/ files and some /etc/rc0.d....../etc/rc6.d files thrown 
> in. There was other misc. stuff which I won't bother to list. When I 
> tried to delete them I got the "No such file or directory" notice.
> Places->Search for Files showed only the .deb packages in the 
> /var/cache/apt/archives directory. Reindexing with Tracker and rebooting 
> changed nothing. The phantom files still showed up with "locate".

locate uses a database of filenames to speed its operation.  The
database is updated by updatedb once a day.  Look in /etc/cron.daily and
you will see the cron job mlocate which calls updatedb.  I suspect the
database was just out of date.  On my system cron runs the daily jobs at
6:25 AM local time.  This is found in /etc/crontab.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005