Locate DB

[Barney]

What is the "official" proper way to update the locate DB? If you run locate.updatedb as root, it scolds you to not run it as root. Running it as a user yields:

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb: cannot create /var/db/locate.database: Permission denied

 

[Mjölnir]

What is the "official" proper way to update the locate DB?

/etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate or periodic weekly 310.locate

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb: cannot create /var/db/locate.database: Permission denied

Run as root. I.e. precede sudo(8) or runas(8) to the above commands, or log in as root, e.g. invoke the command su - .

 

[ralphbsz]

Even easier: Go into /etc/periodic.conf.local, and make sure weekly_locate_enable is set to true. Then it will automatically get updated once a week. I have actually a created a new entry in periodic/daily/320.locate, which is simply a copy of the weekly one, and disabled the weekly one; like that my locate is never older than a day.

 

[Barney]

The point here is that I need to update is manually; like when I mount another disk and want to index what's on the disk. Or when I add some stuff to a system and want to update locate right away

 

[ralphbsz]

If you want to manually run the database update once: /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb. Read the man page for locate.updatedb first, and look in /etc/periodic/.../320.locate, which will show you examples of the command line arguments.

 

[tingo]

If you just want to update manually, you can also just run the periodic scripts manually:
# /etc/periodic/weekly/310.locate

 

[Barney]

Grrrrr.

If you want to manually run the database update once: /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb. Read the man page for locate.updatedb first, and look in /etc/periodic/.../320.locate, which will show you examples of the command line arguments.

The OP points out the problem with running locate.updatedb; regular users don't have permission to create the db because its owned by nobody so only root and nobody can update it.

 

[ralphbsz]

Oops, sorry, missed that completely. You can not run it is a regular user, that's correct. You can run it as root, but you will get a warning, and the warning makes sense. You can run it as user nobody (example how to do it is in the 310.locate script, not 320 as I wrote, that was a typo).