Re: locatedb question

[cjwatson@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Mike Dresser <mdresser@windsormachine.com> wrote:
>router:~# locate \* | wc -l
>68558
>router:~# updatedb
>router:~# locate \* | wc -l
>91395
>
>Every night, updatedb runs, and updates, removing something like 21000
>files from the locatedb.

Perhaps it's ignoring some of the paths and filesystems it's told to
prune in /etc/updatedb.conf? Those are only noticed by the cron job, not
by casual use, unless you source that file.

>Looking through the cron.daily, i see updatedb runs as nobody.  Is
>there a particular danger in running this as other than nobody?

I wouldn't worry about files that aren't world-readable (as another
respondent suggested), but when *directories* aren't world-readable then
an updatedb running as root would expose the names of files within those
directories to the rest of the system.

slocate remembers the permissions on directories and makes sure that it
only exposes the names of files within them to users who would normally
be able to see inside those directories.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]