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#1 2019-02-10 03:13:23

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,130

What are possible causes of man-db Index/database being removed?

I just discovered that the database/index of man pages on my machine had disappeared. Obviously, regenerating it was not a problem, but I would like to figure out why it happened and, if possible, avoid a repeat.

Looking at the journal, I could see that the update service failed to run due to a failed condition. Running the service manual gave the same result.

[Unit]
Description=Daily man-db regeneration
Documentation=man:mandb(8)
ConditionACPower=true

[Service]
Type=oneshot
# Recover from deletion, per FHS.
ExecStart=+/usr/bin/install -d -o root -g root -m 0755 /var/cache/man
# Expunge old catman pages which have not been read in a week.
ExecStart=/usr/bin/find /var/cache/man -type f -name *.gz -atime +6 -delete
# Regenerate man database.
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mandb
User=root
Nice=19
IOSchedulingClass=idle
IOSchedulingPriority=7

Fair enough. It is failing because I'm on battery. I've no objection to this, but I cannot figure out why the old manual pages disappeared altogether.

As I understand the above

ExecStart=+/usr/bin/install -d -o root -g root -m 0755 /var/cache/man

just ensures the directory exists  (it used to use mkdir -p, I think) and

ExecStart=/usr/bin/find /var/cache/man -type f -name *.gz -atime +6 -delete

shouldn't delete the index/database.

Question: is it possible for the above service to delete the index on a laptop without replacing it?

Or might mandb do this?

Or should I be worrying about hardware problems?


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#2 2019-02-12 04:04:00

smudge
Member
Registered: 2011-03-20
Posts: 158

Re: What are possible causes of man-db Index/database being removed?

No need to worry about hardware, the man-db.timer was disabled in the man-db 2.8.5-1 update. You can see here: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … ca58bda604

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