Re: Rescheduling a job in cron daily

[Bob McClure Jr <robertmcclure earthlink net>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 01:21:59PM +1000, Graeme Nichols wrote:
> Dear Bob McClure and others,
> 
> The following is the output of ps aux while some very heavy disk
> activity was going on (the long lines were shortened due to them
> exceeding the width of my virtual terminal). It appears that the culprit
> is updatedb, although I must admit to not really understanding what I am
> looking at.
> 
> I would like to move the disk hog to cron weekly because the heavy disk
> activity is a pain in the rear end. Could you advise me how to do it
> please?
> 
> output of ps aux follows:
> 
> root      1622  0.0  0.3  1356  380 ?        S    12:52   0:00
> /sbin/ppp-watch ppp0 ifcfg-ppp0
> root      1624  0.0  0.6  1836  856 ttyS0    S    12:52   0:00 pppd
> -detach lock modem crtscts asyncmap 00000000 defaroot      1706  0.0 
> 0.8  3820 1080 ?        SN   12:55   0:00 /bin/bash /usr/bin/run-parts
> /etc/cron.daily
> root      1996  0.0  0.7  3808  996 ?        SN   12:56   0:00 /bin/sh
> /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron
> root      1997  0.0  0.5  3584  720 ?        SN   12:56   0:00 awk -v
> progname=/etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron progname
> root      1999  0.8  0.4  1472  572 ?        DN   12:56   0:02
> /usr/bin/updatedb -f NFS,SMBFS,NCPFS,PROC,DEVPTS -e /t
> 
> -- 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Graeme Nichols

updatedb is the process that builds a database of all (well, most) of
the filesystems on the machine.  That database is used by "locate"
which is a kind of "find" on steroids.  To find some file, say,
foobar, on the system, you can

  locate foo

and it will list all pathnames containing "foo", perhaps including

/home/bubba/food/menu.txt
/home/bubba/tools/foobar.pl
  ... etc.

Why is it running at 12:56?  It is normally run out of
/etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron at 0402 or thereabouts based on the
contents of /etc/crontab.

Yes, you can simply

  mv /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron /etc/cron.weekly/

but (1) your locate database will be up to six days old, and (2) I
think you have a much more important problem of either a screwed up
system clock or /etc/crontab.

Fix the real problem first.  Maybe the other problem won't be a
problem.

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure earthlink net  http://www.bobcatos.com
Happiness is an inside job.