I've noticed every now and then, in the middle of the day, the hard drive starts to sound like a lot of activity is going on when I'm just doing some light surfing. I check "Activity Monitor," and it shows that user "nobody" is running a whole lot of processes, stuff like:
find
sort
tr
locate.code
makewhatis
Is this normal system self-maintainance? Or is a hacker sifting through my directories?
TIA
Are you running Tiger? Could just be Spotlight indexing files.
Oops, sorry I forgot to provide the usual info- yes, it's X.4
That sounds like the locate database is updating.
The 'locate' command from terminal consults a database of the files on disk, and can instantly return the location of files you search for... so if you went:
locate elvis
it'd show where all files or directories with 'elvis' in their name are. In order to create this database of files, the script as /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb is run periodically, and it calls those processes you listed. On a default OSX install, I think it runs automatically once a week, sunday mornings about 4am.
Dana