phantom files

[Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 04:25:31PM -0700, Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> 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 database was just out of date.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.

slocate used to check for the existence of the files before printing
their names.  Does mlocate not do so?

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Apologies for taking up the bandwidth with the apology.  Anything else I
can apologise for ...... er no can't think of anything, sorry about that.
                Andy Hunt (Member of British Olympic Apology Squad)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20080910/44afabb9/attachment.sig>