strange find process

[Anh Ky Huynh]

On Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:24:04 -0500
Michael Powell <nightrecon at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 

Thank you very much, Michael.

The `periodic` is mentioned in the Handbook but I seem to leave it too soon.

FreeBSD is so funny :)

Regards,

-- 
Anh Ky Huynh