phantom files

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

2008/9/11 Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>:

> Tracker indexes file content while locate just keeps track of files.
> IIRC locate was a hack to speed up "find / -print.  In a perfect world
> you probably should merge the two systems, although tracker seems a bit
> heavy for just keeping track of pathnames.

Also, tracker attempts to trace filesystem changes in real time. The
infrastructure for doing that efficiently was not present at the time
locate has been designed.

OTOH locate's updatedb runs as root and has a single database for the
whole filesystem and for all users (locate filters results according
to user permissions, so users only see files they could normally
access), while tracker is run separately by each user and usually
indexes only his home directory.

Neither is a full replacement of the other, which is a pity, and is
not trivial to improve.

-- 
Marcin Kowalczyk
qrczak at knm.org.pl
http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/