Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:24:04 -0500 From: Michael Powell <nightrecon@hotmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: strange find process Message-ID: <hh3l3t$96k$1@ger.gmane.org> References: <20091226042600.1920a0e1@icy.localdomain>
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Anh Ky Huynh wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> At 2:00 am today, I turned my laptop on and suddenly found a strange
> process:
>
> $ ps xauw | grep find
> ... find -sx ./bin -type f
> ( -perm -u+x -or -perm -g+x -or -perm -o+x )
> ( -perm -u+s -or -perm -g+s ) -exec ls -liTd {} +
>
> What is the purpose of this process? If that is a system check then where
> is the log file?
There are some scripts called periodic which execute and perform various
different things depending upon whether it is a daily, weekly, or monthly.
The output will get emailed to root, or redirected to an alias of root.
The above looks strangely enough like a snippet of this activity. The daily
usually runs every morning here at 3AM, the weekly rebuilds the locate and
whatis database something like 4:15AM Saturday morning, and the monthly is
an end of the month count of login activity.
More info can be found in man periodic. There is a periodic.conf in
/etc/defaults, and the scripts themselves live in /etc/periodic and you can
take a look. My bet is you stumbled upon one of the periodic script runs.
-Mike
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