Bug in /etc/cron.d/mlocate.cron or am I crazy?

[Steven W. Orr]

On 11/28/09 15:05, quoth Matthew Miller:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 02:51:58PM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
>> Yes, I agree that if I see that script hanging on a regular basis then I
>> will provide trace data to Bugzilla for further analysis. But this begs
>> two questions:
> 
> It's pretty important to know where it's hanging. I don't think it's likely
> to be a bug in awk; therefore, I think it's probably likely you'll see the
> same thing with your version of the script.

We will see any day now. It happens pretty regularly. I could be wrong, I'm
betting that the problem is not related to being unsuccessful at looping in a
script and that it's more likely to be related to some child process cleanup
problem.

>> Either way, the original script is deficient because it does not properly
>> recognize fields 1 and 2.
> 
> Again, only an issue if a filesystem type happens to be given the name
> "nodev" *and* isn't itself a nodev fs *and* shouldn't be excluded from
> updatedb anyway. So, that seems pretty academic, even though you're
> technically correct.

Now you've jinxed it! I'll betcha a buck that Murphy is subscribed to this
list and that's the next thing that's going to happen. It'll probably be a
feature of ZFS. ;-)

> Second, there's nothing performance-sensitive about this part of the script,
> so optimizing out an awk call at the expense of changing a simple one-liner
> to a half-page function doesn't seem like a win. So, updating the awk
> pattern to use either a regular expression or the same logic found in your
> function seems like the better change (if any is to be made at all).
> 

I'm willing to work with this approach, but then the proper way to do it in
awk would be as follows:

nodevs=$(< /proc/filesystems awk -F '\t' '/^nodev/ && NF==2 { print $2 }')

I don't know if it's becoming obvious or not, but I'm starting to get (maybe
overly) sensitive about how well scripts are written compared to the higher
standards that are demanded in other languages. Is this an invalid social
observation?

>> Am I being too anal? Is it a doc problem? Is it a bug in mlocate that should
>> be fixed?

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net

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