I've mentioned the "magic" feeling that sometimes pops out of the emerge system on Gentoo. Last night it happened again. I realised I hadn't emerged any cron daemon yet, so I stopped the emerge -U world, quickly emerged vixie-cron, then restarted the world emerge.

Having done that, I settled down to my normal pattern of diving into howtos and documentation to figure out how to run slocate and makewhatis daily. These are the kinds of little tasks that every unixish machine should be doing out-of-the-box, and it's always seemed strange to me that the admin has to configure them.

Well, after reading and poking for ten minutes so, I found etc/cron.* (more accurately, re-discovered it). I chdir'd into cron.daily to create a cron script for makewhatis and slocate, and what do I see there, but two scripts named "makewhatis.cron" and "slocate" which do exactly what I was intending.