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A week ago I upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard. I want to use the locate command, but the locate database has not been built yet. So I tried running

sudo launchctl -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist

The plist file only points to /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb and I keep getting the following error in syslog su: pam_acct_mgmt: error in service module
When I try running locate.updatedb directly I get the same error in syslog.

I could handle not using locate, but what bugs me the most is that I don't know what's causing the issue.

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1) I assume you have rebooted and that the account in question is an 'administrator' account. 2) Assuming #1, can you use 'sudo' for other commands, such as 'sudo id'? 3) 'locate' is far less useful in Lion, as even when run by root it only finds 'public' files. – TJ Luoma Oct 4 '11 at 12:51
I have rebooted, my account is in the admin group and sudo works as expected (i.e sudo id returns user identity of root). I know locate is less usefull than for example in linux, I just don't like that it doesn't work. Since I did an upgrade and not a clean install, I don't want any further surprises in the future. – bing Oct 4 '11 at 13:03
I'm the one who edited your text and who just removed the "edit" since it's not relevant to the question. If you're wondering why I can do that, please read the faq. Sorry about the spelling mistake I made. – Loïc Wolff Oct 4 '11 at 14:13

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Debugging pam can be tricky.

Have you tried making a real root shell with sudo -s and running the /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb command.

Alternatively, you could try making a new admin account to be sure your admin account has correct privelages/authentication. Any odd things like server or OpenLDAP that we should know of?

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I tried with a root shell (after reading your answer) and the problem persists. In the root shell I just get su: Sorry after running /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb and in syslog I see the same error message again. I created a new account which I added to the admin group, the same error occurs. I'm on a Lion client machine, so no server utilities installed and I don't have OpenLDAP configured. – bing Oct 4 '11 at 22:21
up vote 1 down vote

This seems to work for me.

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
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up vote 0 down vote

You can run the command to update the database used by locate directly by calling

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

This will take a while and should refresh the whole index.

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