makewhatis - out of nowhere

[sly]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Sun, 1 May 2005, sly wrote:
> 
>> i installed fc3 1 week ago and since some weired things are happening. 
>> out of nowhere the hdd starts going off like crazy, the cpu runs at 
>> 100%, the temperature goes up. all these are caused by "makewhatis". 
>> witch i don't know how it started and why. and worst of all is that i 
>> can't kill it! anybody had experience this?
> 
> 
> It's part of regular daily system maintenance.  makewhatis creates a 
> database of summaries of man pages to answer queries like "man -k", 
> "apropos", and "whatis".  It's fairly disk-intensive, but shouldn't take 
> more than a few minutes.

thanx a lot for the info. i will remove it because is on my laptop and it kills the performance for few minutes and i don't use "apropos" that often on my laptop.

> 
> The other disk-intensive daily operation is updatedb, which builds the 
> database for "locate".  That command lists paths to all files where the 
> path containts a particular string.  It's much faster than "find", but 
> requires an up-to-date database.  Again, it shouldn't take more than a 
> few minutes each day.
> 
> You can shut these off if you want by removing scripts in 
> /etc/cron.daily, but you will find that the usefulness of the commands 
> these databases support will decay over time--if you don't run updatedb 
> regularly, you won't be able to "locate" files added since the last 
> updatedb, and if you don't run makewhatis, you won't be able to 
> "apropos" man pages added after the last makewhatis.
> 



      sly.


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