On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 08:51:34AM -0400, Whit Hansell wrote:
Guys,
Using Wheezy, debian.....
In the past I have always done my updates w.
#aptitude update
#aptitude safe-upgrade
#aptitude autoclean
#updatedb
Everything is working just fine and no problem except the updatedb
command. I know it used to actually update the file database and
sometimes it actually took some time to do it. And sometimes when I
would install a file from outside aptitude I would have to run
updatedb to get the system to recognize it. Now when I run updatedb
it seem like it is doing nothing. It takes no time at all yet so
far am having no recognition problems. Am just wondering if I'm
actually doing anything by trying to run it. E.g is it actually
updating?
A couple of caveats:
1) This isn't strictly amd64 related.
2) updatedb isn't actually related to the package database, but
maintains a list of all files on your system.
It sounds to me like your locate package has been upgraded to mlocate.
As per the package status of mlocate, mlocate differs from plain locate
in that when you run "locate foo" you only see files to which you have
access. Also instead of re-reading the whole filesystem, timestamps are
taken into account and only changed files are recorded in the database.
As a result updatedb is, as you have found, a lot faster.
For the record, there's no real need to call "updatedb" after an update
as there should be a cron job that does that for you. However, there's
also no harm in it and I can see a reason for doing so.