From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 Description of problem: The default cron job for the slocate package (/etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron) calls "locate" using the updatedb symlink. When this runs on a machine with ext3 filesystems the resulting slocate.db (/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db) is about 1byte in size. It seems to only contain the ascii digit "1". In the man page for updatedb it is stated that locate simply runs with the -u option when called as updatedb. There's clearly more going on here, since the following change to /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron seems to fix the problem: [ Original line ] /usr/bin/updatedb -f "nfs,smbfs,ncpfs,proc,devpts" -e "/tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/tmp,/afs,/net" [ Modified line ] /usr/bin/locate -u -f "nfs,smbfs,ncpfs,proc,devpts" -e "/tmp,/var/tmp,/usr/tmp,/afs,/net" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Upgrade to RH 7.2 2.Run the default slocate.cron in /etc/cron.daily 3.Find that /var/lib/slocate/slocate.db is now a nearly empty file Actual Results: My slocate.db file becomes a 1 byte file containing the number "1". Expected Results: My slocated.db should have been updated to contain a nice big index of my filesystems. Additional info: This happens on a Red Hat 7.1 box that has been retrofitted with ext3 filesystems as well.
This works fine for me on ext3; I get a normal sized file. What happens if you strace the call to slocate?
Also, do you have your filesystem set to 'auto' in /etc/fstab?
This happens to me in RedHat 7.2 as well, if the root file system is auto. I edited /etc/mtab by hand and changed 'auto' to 'ext3' and re-ran /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron and it worked fine. BTW, even though I have 'auto' in /etc/fstab for all of my ext3 file systems, only the / filesystem showed up as auto in /etc/mtab.
Please verify this with a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core and reopen it against the new version if it still occurs. Closing as "not a bug" for now.