I've once again been bitten by out-of-date caches. I finally got tired of looking up all the cache rebuilding commands and decided to write myself a short zsh function to do all the ones I know about (and as I discover more they can go in here). Here's what I've got at the moment:
recache() {
sudo true
sudo updatedb &
local updatedbpid=$!
sudo ldconfig &
local ldconfigpid=$!
rehash
wait $updatedbpid $ldconfigpid
}
The first sudo true is intended to make sure sudo has a recent timestamp, so that the following background processes don't sit suspended on input waiting for me to type my password. I don't use sudo -b because I want to wait until the caches are up to date before continuing my work.
Most of the time, this works great; but about one time in three or so, I get endless copies of the following text:
[2] + suspended (tty output) sudo updatedb
Why? What can I do to fix it?
So I never did figure out why this was happening. My best guess is there's some resource that sudo is trying to lock, and the two invocations of sudo get in a race for it. In any case, I've been using the following modified recache function for some time without trouble. The main difference is that there is only a single backgrounded sudo, and it runs both updatedb and ldconfig in parallel, rather than one backgrounded sudo per process.
recache() {
sudo true
sudo zsh -c 'updatedb & ldconfig & wait' &
local pid=$!
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wait $pid
}