On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 02:48:35PM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote: > Cron runs the weekly update script every Saturday at 3:30am. If you > use a laptop or other desktop, your computer probably isn't on then. > So the locate and whatis databases never get updated unless you run it > by hand.
I run the daily and weekly scripts by hand on my laptop, and I think that that's the way it should be. If your laptop is on at 3:30am, then you're probably doing something important and don't want to be bothered by the daily or weekly security scripts. For example, if you've placed files in /tmp then the daily script might erase them (and you'll be left wondering "where did my files go?"). I've also had an incident where the security script ran while I was burning a CD and it caused a buffer underflow. For that reason, I've disabled the cronjobs. I run /etc/weekly every time I install new software (to update the whatis database). I run /etc/daily once a week when I backup my hard drive.
