Updatedb.mlocate: what's it good for? how to deactivate it?[SOLVED]

[foersu]

Hello,

Directly after powering on my notebook I noticed a very intensive activity on the HD which lasted for several minutes.
Using htop, I could see that updatedb.mlocate was producing a high CPU load. I did not know this application before and was not aware, that it runs at start up time of my notebook.

I started researching in the web about this program and now I have a coarse idea of what it is.

But I still have the following questions:

• which applications make use of the data base and require therefore, that this one is continuously updated?
• is it a new feature of Ubuntu/Mint to set it up at installation time to run daily? I have been using Mint for several years and did not take notice of it before
• is there a major drawback if I dissable/deactivate it at all?
• how do I deactivate it completely? (Rem.: I do not want to delete it, only deactivate)

Thanks in advance for any information.

Regards

My OS:
Mint 18.2, Xfce 64-bits.
(No further OSs in my notebook)

[trytip]

in etc/cron.daily/ there is a script mlocate you can compress it then delete the file. if you want to reactivate go back to etc/cron.daily/ and UNcompress mlocate

mlocate is stored in /var/lib/mlocate/ and it's a database for making file search faster. i usually update it with catfish under settings Update search index

[blockhead47]

updatedb and locate are the associated commands
Both commands are standard linux commands. I believe both are in the core Linux Mint OS install
I think most of your questions can be answered using the man command

Code: Select all

man updatedb

and

Code: Select all

man locate

A little googling produces a nice tutorial at https://www.tecmint.com/linux-locate-co ... -examples/

[foersu]

Thank you all for your responses.

@ trytip: indirectly you gave me a very practical way to easily update the db using catfish. I just tried it and it worked! Can I deduce, that catfish is based upon the "locate" Unix/Linux command?

Regards

[trytip]

i wouldn't say catfish is based on locate but does use that as a resource. is your issue SOLVED?