/bin/cat
appears to be running as a persistent daemon on my 12.04 system.
$ ps aux | grep cat detlef 2278 0.0 0.0 8680 352 ? S 06:13 0:00 /bin/cat
Why does Ubuntu 12.04 need cat
running as a daemon? It didn't on my 10.04.4 system.
/bin/cat
appears to be running as a persistent daemon on my 12.04 system.
$ ps aux | grep cat detlef 2278 0.0 0.0 8680 352 ? S 06:13 0:00 /bin/cat
Why does Ubuntu 12.04 need cat
running as a daemon? It didn't on my 10.04.4 system.
cat
is running as part of the Unity Dash Text-Search service (zeitgeist-fts
)cat
is not a daemon; conCATenate is a utility which joins one or more input files into a single output file.
/bin/cat
runs on Ubuntu 12.04 as a part of the Zeitgeist service, which logs events, history, etc. and also enables the search-as-you-type in the dash feature.
Specifically, it is started by zeitgeist-fts
(Zeitgeist Full-Text-Search), which is the Zeitgeist component providing the search feature.
Proof: notice the PID of cat
(3082) in ps
andpstree
output:
$ ps aux | grep /bin/cat
izx 3082 0.0 0.0 11372 568 ? S Jun08 0:00 /bin/catand
$ pstree -p | grep zeit
├─zeitgeist-daemo(3051)───{zeitgeist-daemo}(3061) ├─zeitgeist-datah(3076)───{zeitgeist-datah}(3081) └─zeitgeist-fts(3075)─┬─cat(3082) └─{zeitgeist-fts}(3080)
Zeitgeist/Unity did not exist in 10.04, so no cat
either! As for why it's needed, cat
is universally used for text processing, and the function of its parent zeitgeist-fts
is...text processing :)