phantom files

[Derek Broughton]

Marius Gedminas wrote:

> 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:

>> 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 database was just out of date.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?

Whew!  It's not just me.  I noticed this for the first time yesterday.  I
was sure that was the case _recently_, but yesterday I 'locate'd a string,
deleted a few of the files shown, and did the locate again and they all
showed up.
-- 
derek