Re: Status of updatedb

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2005-12-17 James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> I notice that a lot of Linux distributions use slocate, which updates
> the database with a binary rather than a script.

slocate has a different featureset:

| It uses incremental encoding just like GNU locate to compress its
| database to make searching faster, but it will also store file
| permissions and ownership so that users will not see files they do not
| have access to.

Therefore the updatedb-thingy runs as superuser, and the slocate command
has to be smart.

findutils' locate does not need to handle priviledge
escalation, sparing it two CVEs. (slocate seems to be dead upstream,
too. stormix.com does not exist anymore afaict.)
                cu andreas
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