[arch-general] inotify and locate

[Andrea Crotti]

On 02/26/2012 12:18 PM, Raven wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:49:55 +0800, Andrea Crotti 
> <andrea.crotti.0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It's a bit a shame that there isn't any default good indexing system 
>> for Linux.
>> Now there is also a inotify implementation and tools to set up 
>> watchers on the filesystem,
>> so why are we still mainly stuck with locate and the expensive updatedb?
>>
>> Are there other problems with the inotify approach maybe or just lack 
>> of developer interest?
>
> Great idea, though I thought inotify doesn't suit this task. For 
> updatedb, it should call inotify_watch for every file on the 
> filesystem, that's quite inefficient.
>
> I think Linux's audit system could do this, though.

Well I don't mean to integrate directly updatedb and locate, I mean a 
new tool that uses the inotify api.
The efficiency might be a problem sure, but if you filter well only on 
the paths and the files that you
actually need I don't think it would be too bad, after all inotify is in 
the kernel.

How would the audit system be better? And what do you mean exactly?