Subject: 'locate' broken two months ago?
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
List: current-users
Date: 04/22/2006 22:28:20
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.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb