I've noticed that when the system is `idle' -- i.e. I'm away from the keyboard -- the harddrive sometimes fires up for longish periods. I looked at the process table and noticed that `find' is using (up to) 5% system resources (login: nobody) and everything else is on 0.00. Therefore, I conclude that it is `find' which is causing the hd activity. If I do something like open the web browser, the find process stops (so it must be controlled on the basis of priority, I guess).

What is telling `find' to run, and what is it looking for? I'm using KDE 3.1.4 on SuSE 9.0.

Best

Ian

probably updatedb running through cron. this will save a snapshot of your files which can be instantly searched by using the locate command. by default this typically runs at abot 2am, but this is obviosuly just dependent on the distro itself.

Huh? I thought find searches the directory-tree and locate has the database maintained by updatedb (which I run manually as needed). Was I wrong?

You weren't wrong, but what does updatedb use to build the database? I assume it uses "find"

Hm. Why not e.g. ls?