[rw]

While my computer was sitting idle, I noticed the hard drive suddenly becoming active and running for some time. Checking top showed the culprit to probably be a process called "find" which, according to the man page, traverses the directory. Does anyone know why find was running and what it was doing?

http://home.earthlink.net/~khr/find.jpg

[Hop Pocket]

Use activity monitor to view your processes hierarchically. Like this:



That should tell you what process has started find. Find simply generates a list of files and is usually invoked in such a way that another program performs some action on the found files.

[Arkham_c]

There is a process kicked off once a week by cron located at /etc/weekly that updates the "locate" database.

This command uses find, so I suspect that is what you were seeing.