[OS X TeX] kpsewhich pointing to wrong location?
Michael S. Hanson
mshanson at wesleyan.edu
Sat Jan 20 21:31:46 CET 2007
On Jan 20, 2007, at 3:01 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>> (As one data point, I notice that on my home iMac running
>> 10.4.8, /var/db/locate.database was last updated at 18:25 on Mon,
>> Jan 15. I don't know if that is "normal" or if some other process
>> spawned an update, but I didn't do it manually, and the iMac is
>> very rarely not asleep overnight.)
>
> You might have anacron (from Mac Ports or Fink) ...
I might, but as I have never gunked up any of my Macs with MacPorts,
Fink, or any other *nix package manager, I do not. locate and find
confirm that anacron is not on my iMac. I also do not use any of the
third-party system maintenance programs (Macaroni, Janitor, Onyx,
AppleJack, Yasu, etc.) on my iMac. Other ideas?
A quick Google search seems to confirm that launchd counts the
elapsed time since the last execution of each of the periodic
scripts, excluding when the computer is asleep, to determine when to
run each of them. According to, for example, <http://
developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/
Articles/Daemons.html>:
"Mac OS X runs these jobs in different ways depending on the version
of Mac OS X. In Mac OS X v10.3 and earlier, cron(8) is responsible
for starting periodic jobs. In v10.4 and later, launchd(8) starts the
jobs.
As a result, if your computer is asleep at the scheduled time, in Mac
OS X v10.3 and earlier, the job does not run; in Mac OS X v10.4 and
later, the job executes automatically when the computer wakes up. For
this reason, you should not assume that a job will run at a
particular time or on a particular day.
Note: If the computer is turned off at the scheduled time, the jobs
does not run at all, regardless of what version of Mac OS X you are
using.
You can configure the periodic(8) tool by modifying /etc/defaults/
periodic.conf. For more information, see the manual page for
periodic.conf(5)."
Hence, it would appear that the locate database is updated on a
(more-or-less) regular basis under 10.4.x, even if the computer is
asleep overnight. Of course, as I noted in my previous reply, I know
relatively little Unix, so I may misunderstand what I have found. YMMV.
-- Mike
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