Re: [OT] inotify hack for locate

Chris Ball
2006-03-05T23:41:50Z

>> On 5 Mar 2006 21:36:19, Jon Masters <jonmasters@gmail.com> said:

> I'm fed up with those finds running whenever I power on. Has
> anyone written an equivalent of the Microsoft indexing service to
> update locate's database?

I think the reason this hasn't been done is that inotify_add_watch()es
are non-recursive: you'd need a watch over every directory, and you'd
need a crawling step (churn, churn) to enumerate the directories to
add watches for.

Beagle (which only indexes home directories, by default) uses an
algorithm for placing watches as it crawls, such that by the end
of the crawl you can guarantee not to have a lost a race on new
directories being created while the crawl was happening:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2004-October/msg00022.html

- Chris.
--
Chris Ball <cjb@mrao.cam.ac.uk> <http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~cjb/>