How to disable updatedb for locate command

Updatedb is the functionality associated with locate command in Linux.

This is configured as a cronjob in-order to update the files details to locate database in frequent interval.

If the number of files are very huge, updatedb will take long time to continue and also cause resources shortage in server.

So we can disable this functionality if not required.

First of all login to the terminal and kill the updatedb process.

#killall updatedb.mlocate

Disable the updatedb cronjob.

#chmod -x /etc/cron.daily/mlocate

Please note that we can enable it back at any time using the following command.

#chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/mlocate

That's all…