Problem with recursive searches.

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Hello, all.  Recently, I set up a new server at my job; it's running a 
self-compiled (for various, relatively exotic, reasons) 2.6.6 kernel, 
Debian testing.  My first sign of this particular problem was that 
"updatedb" wouldn't run.  I even wrote the developer; no dice.  Finally 
decided, "Well, who needs them, anyway.  I'll do my own."  So I wrote a 
little script to do a find from the top level, zip it, and have locate 
do a grep on the uncompressed output.  Put it in crontab... and watched 
it fall flat on its face.  Running find -- as any user -- on root dies 
thusly:

# find /
[some 200-odd files scroll by, all from /root]
/root/.Xauthority
find: ./.. changed during execution of find

Using "strace", I've determined that this is the same place that 
updatedb dies.  updatedb used to die on a different file -- an 
unnecessary one -- so I'd deleted it, and it had gone some 100 files 
further before dying.  I'm guessing the error message means that it 
thinks its parent directory has changed during execution, and I can't 
figure out why it would think that.  Google shows that this happens a 
lot with Cygwin, but not a whole lot in Linux-land.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Ken