Dan, On Sunday 13 February 2005 04:22, Dan Am wrote:
Am Sonntag 13 Februar 2005 04:23 schrieb Randall R Schulz:
However, for such simple invocations of find, you really should be using the "locate" command. It's far faster, won't be restricted from disclosing files in unreadable sub-directories and will be far easier on your hard drives.
Apart from these advantages, AFAIR the trouble is, that it updates "atime" on all files, which can mess up backups. That is probably, why it is not installed by default.
How's that? What modifies the access time? The cron job that builds the database queried by the "locate" job? That's certainly not true. Why would it (the cron job) read all the files on your system? Naturally, it enumerates directory contents and their access times get set when that happens, but so what? And why would a backup program care about file access times? Naturally, a newer modification time might cause a file to be backed up again (if its contents actually changed) but backup software that tried to track all access times would not be something I'd want to use.
Regrds Dan
Randall Schulz