Take the 2-minute tour ×

Having gone through the /etc/cron.daily directory I noticed that there is only the mlocate.cron file in comparison to what I have seen on other material where they cite slocate.cron. Is there a difference between these and their respective commands and if so what are they?

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote accepted

https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/ explains that mlocate merges databases at each update, which offers a performance speedup since it can skip previously examined files.

They are competing implementations, but mlocate is designed to be backwards compatible with slocate and is slowly replacing it.

share|improve this answer
Thanks. When you say that mlocate merges databases at each update, what does this mean exactly? –  PeanutsMonkey Jul 23 '11 at 1:40
@Peanuts, looking at the link provided by Stephanie, it seems that mlocate (which makes a database of file locations) reuses a previous database each time it runs, so any new information is merged with the old information, to save time and give a performance speedup. –  pavium Jul 23 '11 at 2:26
@pavium - So would this mean that I would have multiple mlocate.cron files? –  PeanutsMonkey Jul 23 '11 at 4:44
@peanuts, no, the databases are merged:- the new data generated when the mlocate.cron runs is merged with the old data from the last time it ran. It doesn't mean we need multiple mlocate.cron files. –  pavium Jul 23 '11 at 4:56
@pavium - So essentially it is appending new data to the old. Is thar correct? –  PeanutsMonkey Jul 23 '11 at 5:04
show 3 more comments

Your Answer


