Application Inquiry

[Werner Schram]

Patrick Doyle wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 7:46 PM, neil al <nva0721 at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>> May I know what is the meaning of this find command :
>> /usr/bin/find / -ignore_readdir_race ( -fstype NFS -o -fstype nfs -o -fstype
>> nfs4 -o -fstype afs -o -fstype binfmt_misc -o -fstype proc -o -fstype smbfs
>> -o -fstype autofs -o -fstype iso9660 -o -fstype ncpfs -o -fstype coda -o
>> -fstype devpts -o -fstype ftpfs -o -fstype devfs -o -fstype mfs -o -fstype
>> shfs -o -fstype sysfs -o -fstype cifs -o -fstype lustre_lite -o -fstype
>> tmpfs -o -fstype usbfs -o -fstype udf -o -fstype ocfs2 -o -type d -regex
>> \(^/tmp$\)\|\(^/usr/tmp$\)\|\(^/var/tmp$\)\|\(^/afs$\)\|\(^/amd$\)\|\(^/alex$\)\|\(^/var/spool$\)\|\(^/sfs$\)\|\(^/media$\)\|\(^/var/lib/schroot/mount$\)
>> ) -prune -o -print0
>>     
>
> Do you want to know what this command does, or do you want to know why
> it happens to be running on your system?
>
> If the former, I'd direct you at the man page for the "find" command,
> but, in a nutshell, it is recursively listing all of the files on your
> system, stopping at NFS mounted directories, special directories, /tmp
> directories, etc...
>
> If the latter, I'm afraid I can't help you.
>   
It searches for every file on your disk. This command is started by the 
updatedb command, which is started once every day at 6:25 (local time) 
to update a database of files on your disk. You can use this database 
with the locate command (in a terminal) to quickly find files. As far as 
I know the database isn't used by any  other applications. The process 
is started with the ionice command, which means that it shouldn't be 
interfering with any other commands, so it shouldn't do any harm to 
leave it running.

It might cause your harddisk to make some noise though. If it bothers 
you, you could disable or reschedule it.

Werner