Bug#3022: updatedb --prune-paths doesn't work with mountpoints
The immediate problem is easy to solve. updatedb uses has an option
of "--prunepaths", not "--prune-paths". Get rid of the "-" between
"prune" and "paths". This should take care of the problem.
Unfortunately, the output of cron jobs is often missed. In my tests,
updatedb does not exhibit this problem when the correct options are
used.
updatedb is the biggest problem in the findutils package. For now, I
do not want to add arbitrary directories to the default exclusion
list. I will not add /var/spool or /var/spool/news to the list
(unless there is great demand for it). In the long run, I want to
create the arguments to updatedb as part of the package installation
process. Perhaps a few of the least favorite directories will be
mentioned. Either /var/spool or /var/spool/news will be included in
the list. Unfortunately, I don't have this scheduled yet. It
probably will not make it in the 1.1 release of Debian.
This bug is closed.
>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Shields <shields@crosslink.net> writes:
> Package: findutils
> Version: 4.1-4
> I don't want updatedb to kill my news server's performance every night by
> recursing through the hundreds of thousands of files there, which all have
> names like `168' anyway. So I changed /etc/cron.daily/find to read:
> su nobody -c "updatedb --prune-paths='/tmp /var/tmp /var/spool'" 2>/dev/null
> However, this doesn't work, apparently because /var/spool/news is a
> mountpoint, and mountpoints are not subject to --prune-paths.
> /var/spool, certainly /var/spool/news, ought to be pruned by default.
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