/usr/bin/find running background.......consuming 1.5G ram?

ErrorBound · 11-07-2006, 08:32 AM

Recently I've noticed that from time to time, /usr/bin/find is running as a background process as user "nobody". It's consuming 1.5G of virtual memory and I'm wondering just what this is doing? I've looked it up and read the manpage, but can't get any idea why this would be running as a daemon.

I'm running Debian etch and KDE

Dutch Master · 11-07-2006, 09:51 AM

It might be automatically updating it's database. The command for that is 'updatedb' to update the database the locate and find programs use. If you were on Win-OS i'd say you'd have a trojan or virus, but I'm not aware of something similar for Linux (which doesn't mean it doesn't exist...) Next time it happens, kill it with it's process-id (if it's CPU intensive you'd be able to find that with the top command) and see what error you get, if at all.