Thursday, April 23, 2009

Excluding Directories from updatedb on CentOS 5

Running the updatedb command will update the slocate database.  However if you want to exclude certain directories for any reason, such as not wanting to include a huge NFS file store or something to that affect you have two options.

1) use the -e switch with a comma seperated list of directories to not index. (updatedb -e /Storage,/home)

2)edit the /etc/updatedb.conf file.
  •  vi /etc/updatedb.conf
  • find the PRUNEPATHS section and add the directories to the list seperated by spaces. (PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/spool/cups /var/spool/squid /var/tmp /Storage /home")
Also you can read up on updatedb by reading the man pages.
man updatedb