Updatedb - what is it for?

[federico]

Gábor Iglói wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> My machine sometimes starts to work furiously on the hard drive. So
> I'm curious why. I issued a "top" command and found that the updatedb
> process is working at these times. I haven't meet this thing in
> another distro (maybe it's there too but I didn't noticed it) - so I
> would like to ask: what it is and what it is for? I tried man and
> Google but still not clear what's good in it.
> 

It is the database used by slocate.

Bye