Re: Status of updatedb

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 10:49:08AM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On 2005-11-30 James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
> > The updatedb script seems to be pretty complex and messy.  In addition
> > there are some problems with it.  For example, if find returns a
> > nonzero result it carries on regardless, I think.  
> 
> That is one thing, as it is diffcult to make
> 
> foo | bar | blah | fasel | frobnicate
> 
> abort if *any* commad in the pipe produces an error. Other issues are
> that <Ctrl-C> does not work (because of trap) 

Yes, this is awkward.  These are properties of the shell.  However,
using Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, etc. is problematic as this would
add an extra dependency and we don't want that for tools that are
frequently part of the base system.  

> and that in find | sort | datahandling | writeupdatedb only
> writeupdatedb should run as superuser.

Good point.

I notice that a lot of Linux distributions use slocate, which updates
the database with a binary rather than a script.

Thanks,
James.