Wednesday, February 11, 2026

command line – What’s flawed with `find` and `/usr/libexec/find.updatedb`?

I’ve two Macs: one runs Sequoia, the opposite runs Ventura.

On the Sequoia machine, I’m utilizing Apple’s native (and really dated) model of find. Whereas find itself runs OK, I can not replace the database. After putting in new packages (or particular person apps from right here or there), I want to have the ability to confirm the places of sure recordsdata and libraries. I want to use find for this job, however because the db is run solely as soon as per week, I can not watch for the replace!

I assumed it was attainable to carry out a handbook replace utilizing the next command, however I get solely an odd error message that does not appear to be defined wherever:

% sudo /usr/libexec/find.updatedb
mktemp: too few X's in template ‘updatedb’
>>> ERROR
>>> Did not create a brief file for database era.

What’s the drawback right here… why does find.updatedb fail?

man find.updatedb says {that a} job at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.find.plist is run 1/week. I tried to alter the frequency of this job, however was knowledgeable by my LaunchControl app that it was not attainable to alter the scheduling!

And so it appears I can not manually replace the database, and the OS has mutinied its root consumer (me) by locking me out of the power to re-schedule.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RE A POSSIBLY-RELATED FAILURE:

I’ve put in MacPorts (a bundle supervisor) on each machines. As a “Plan B” I assumed I’d attempt to set up the GNU find on my Ventura machine. Sadly, for causes that aren’t clear to me, working the updatedb command additionally fails:

% sudo /choose/native/libexec/gnubin/updatedb
gfind: '/Library/Caches/com.apple.aned': Operation not permitted
gfind: '/System/Library/Templates/Knowledge/non-public/var/db/oah': Operation not permitted
gfind: '/System/Volumes/Knowledge/Library/Caches/com.apple.aned': Operation not permitted 
#
# INSERTED COMMENT: it appears this final line re `/` is the true challenge
#
gfind: didn't learn file names from file system at or beneath "https://apple.stackexchange.com/": No such file or listing

And on this case the GNU find can discover nothing as a result of it can not create a database!

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