How can I tell when my slocate database was last updated? It looks like cron should be doing it every day but I've done it manually several times when I got a warning that it hadn't been updated for several days. Thanks!

look in etc/cron.*

-Joey

Look in /etc/cron* for... what? Everything is set up with cron, /etc/cron.daily is supposed to update slocate and the crontab looks at those files. However, as I stated above, that doesn't seem to be working, so I want to know how I can see when the database was last updated.

Ok, check out the contents of /etc/crontab. That will tell you exactly when the contents of cron.daily are executed. For example, my crontab file has this entry for cron.daily (Red Hat 8):
That's saying that everything in the cron.daily directory gets executed at 4:02 AM every day. If your computer is not turned on at 4:02 AM, then cron will miss that opportunity to run the jobs. So, if you're in the habit of turning off your computer before going to sleep, then it will never get run, and consequently give you the "out of date" message for the database. The solution would be to add the updatedb command to your startup sequence (which might add a significant amount of time to boot), run it manually, or change the time the cron.daily updates are run to sometime you know the machine will be on.

If you're really only after the last time the database was updated, you can check its modification time. On my system, it's located at /var/lib/slocate/slocate.db

Ok, sorry if I didn't ask a clear question, the location of that database file was all I was after. I do realize now that the 4:00 is am, not pm, so that explains it. Thanks!