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locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Printable Version

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locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-25-2023

Hi all,  Smile

I just stumbled over some curious behaviour. The "locate" command doesn´t seem to include my home directory.

On my desktop I created a text-file "prov.txt", then ran "sudo updatedb" but
"locate prov.txt" didn´t return any results.  :023:

The "find" command however doesn´t have any difficulties finding it.
Is it possible that the home directory is excluded by "locate"?

Many thanks in advance and many greetings.

Rosika  :wave

Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - stevef - 01-25-2023

Does it report older files in your home directory by any chance ?
If so check the date/time on the file in

Code:
ls -al /var/lib/mlocate/


Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-25-2023

Hi stevef:

Thanks for your reply.

Quote:Does it report older files in your home directory by any chance ?

No. locate doesn´t seem to find anything in my home directory.
I still punched in your command but just got this:

Code:
ls -al /var/lib/mlocate/
ls: cannot access '/var/lib/mlocate/': No such file or directory

That´s weird...  :029:

Many greetings from Rosika  :wave

Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - stevef - 01-25-2023

OK.  For me, locate does not exclude the home directory on my system, but can't find anything not in the database.

Try

Code:
locate --statistics

This should report your database location. Then check the date time on the file it is using.

Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-25-2023

Hi stevef:

So sorry. Can´t even do that:

Code:
locate --statistics
locate: unrecognized option '--statistics'



Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-25-2023

I dont´t know if it helps anything at all. I´ll give you the contents of updatedb.conf



Code:
cat /etc/updatedb.conf
PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS="yes"
# PRUNENAMES=".git .bzr .hg .svn"
PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /var/spool /media /var/lib/os-prober /var/lib/ceph /home/.ecryptfs
/var/lib/schroot"
PRUNEFS="NFS afs autofs binfmt_misc ceph cgroup cgroup2 cifs coda configfs curlftpfs
debugfs devfs devpts devtmpfs ecryptfs ftpfs fuse.ceph fuse.cryfs fuse.encfs
fuse.glusterfs fuse.gvfsd-fuse fuse.mfs fuse.rclone fuse.rozofs fuse.sshfs fusectl
fusesmb hugetlbfs iso9660 lustre lustre_lite mfs mqueue ncpfs nfs nfs4 ocfs ocfs2 proc
pstore rpc_pipefs securityfs shfs smbfs sysfs tmpfs tracefs udev udf usbfs"


Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - stevef - 01-25-2023

You may have plocate in LL6.  What's date and time of the file plocate.db at

Code:
ls -al /var/lib/plocate/


Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-26-2023

Hi stevef,  Smile

thanks for your help.

Quote:You may have plocate in LL6

Yes, indeed LL 6.2 came with both installed:

Code:
dglob plocate; and dglob mlocate
plocate:amd64
mlocate:all

The output of the command you provided is:

Code:
ls -al /var/lib/plocate/
total 7000
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root       4096 Jan 25 16:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 80 root root       4096 Jan 19 17:41 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root        183 Feb 17  2022 CACHEDIR.TAG
-rw-r-----  1 root plocate 7142630 Jan 25 16:20 plocate.db

So date and time of plocate.db is:

Code:
Jan 25 16:20
Well, I tried the command just yesterday...

Thanks again and many greetings
Rosika :wave


Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - stevef - 01-26-2023

Rosika,

I'm not helping much.  On the systems I have, mlocate (LL5) and plocate (LL6) both find files in the home directory (and any sub-directories) - subject to them being cached in the database.  Is your disk btrfs ?

I found this which suggest some issues with mlocate and btrfs related to home directory

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/the-locate-command-doesnt-show-files-from-home/19470


Re: locate doesn´t seem to include home directory - Rosika - 01-26-2023

Hi stevef,  Smile

thanks for the link.
In fact I stumbled over the same article yesterday but didn´t bother referring to it as it doesn´t seem to apply with my case.

To answer your question:

No, the files system for my LL installation is ext3 for root as well as for home.
So I think changing the respective line to
Code:
PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS = "no"
wouldn´t be of help here.  :023:

Curious though: the locate command does find files elsewhere. So generally it works alright. It´s just the home partition which seems to be excluded.

Thanks anyway for your time and help.

Many greetings
Rosika  :wave