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Can someone explain why these processes are running?

Submitted by dead_elvis on March 10, 2007 - 10:35pm. Unix and Mac OS X

I've noticed every now and then, in the middle of the day, the hard drive starts to sound like a lot of activity is going on when I'm just doing some light surfing. I check "Activity Monitor," and it shows that user "nobody" is running a whole lot of processes, stuff like:

find
sort
tr
locate.code
makewhatis

Is this normal system self-maintainance? Or is a hacker sifting through my directories?

TIA

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Dr. Webster's picture

Are you running Tiger? Could

Submitted by Dr. Webster on March 10, 2007 - 11:16pm.

Are you running Tiger? Could just be Spotlight indexing files.

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Oops, sorry I forgot to provi

Submitted by dead_elvis on March 10, 2007 - 11:59pm.

Oops, sorry I forgot to provide the usual info- yes, it's X.4

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That sounds like the locate d

Submitted by danamania on March 12, 2007 - 11:27am.

That sounds like the locate database is updating.

The 'locate' command from terminal consults a database of the files on disk, and can instantly return the location of files you search for... so if you went:

locate elvis

it'd show where all files or directories with 'elvis' in their name are. In order to create this database of files, the script as /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb is run periodically, and it calls those processes you listed. On a default OSX install, I think it runs automatically once a week, sunday mornings about 4am.

Dana

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