Re: HELP A NEWBIE: user:nobody invoking find

[Ossama Othman <othman@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu>]

Hi,
 
> Wheh I am on the net (with netscape 3.04) my disk suddenly begins
> thrashing. A look at top shows a "find / ( -fstype" under user:nobody.
> The rather extensive find explains the disk thrashing, but who is
> nobody,
> and how do I tell him to knock it off. This has happened twice on two
> consecutive days. Many thanks.

I think that you can safely ignore the "nobody" user.  :)

"Nobody" is a user that most if not all UN*X systems have.  However, it
"nobody" is not a login account, meaning that no one should be able to
logon as "nobody."  The only way to use the "nobody" account is via a
setuid call or via an su.

Basically what is happening is that the cron daemon (daemon to execute
scheduled commands) is running some commands that use the "find" command.
>From what I can tell, the /etc/cron.daily/find file is what cron is
running everyday on your system and everyone elses Debian system,
including mine.

I hope that this answers your question.  :)

-Ossama



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