On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 10:28:20PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> I'd like someone to confirm this, but it appears to me that 'locate' --
> or, more precisely, locate.updatedb -- has been broken since 26 February.
> 
> The change made 'locate' exit if 'find' returned any error indication.
> But it's guaranteed to do so, since it runs as 'nobody' and when 'find'
> encounters unreadable directories (of which there are several in the base
> system) it ultimately exits with a non-zero return code.
> 
> The amusing thing is that it took me two months to notice -- well, 6
> weeks, since I didn't update my systems immediately.
> 

Yes, I can confirm this.  locate.updatedb "works" if run as root, but
since weekly runs it as:
	nice -5 su -m nobody -c /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
the process runs for a very short time before exiting, resulting in a
locate database that has not been updated.

Jeff