killing find

[The_Tobb]

Sometimes when I running suse my hard drive won't stop spinning I look at the running processes and I see that find is running. when I kill it my comp goes back to normal.
Is there any way to stop find from starting up by itself.
I sometimes find ls is running by itself as well.
:confused:

[nopun]

Sorry to jump to the worst conclusions first, but are you sure you don't have an imposter using your system?
I can't think of any reason why your system would initiate a "find" or "ls".
Next time it happens, try checking the parent process (and if necessary, the parent of that process etc) to find where the process originated from. Most wierd.

[The_Tobb]

I'm running a firewall and there's nothing unusual in the logs.
Both find and ls start running about 5 to 10 minutes after I log on and they use most of the system resources.
How do I check the parent process?

[compunuts]

Originally posted by The_Tobb:
<STRONG>I'm running a firewall and there's nothing unusual in the logs.</STRONG> You are running firewall doesn't mean you are hack proof.. and also the imposter ususally erase its track by deleting log entries.... so that you know..... I've never seen ls and find start by itself...... If possible, run a script (with cron tab or something) and back it up to some obsolete directory every minute and analyze there......

[X_console]

I don't think this is something to worry about. Most Linux distributions run "updatedb" at a specific time. "updatedb" updates your current location database so your "locate" command is always updated. "updatedb" happens to use "find" when doing the updating. I suggest checking your crontab files to see when it's run. If it is updatedb, don't kill it in the future. :)

[The_Tobb]

Thanks for your help, updatdb is running find everyday.
But I still can't figure why ls is running.