makewhatis - out of nowhere

[Matthew Saltzman]

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.

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.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs