An alternative approach (assuming your FC4 directories are backups you don't need them very often) is to make them unreadable by ordinary users. locate won't return files you wouldn't have permission to see in a directory listing. So you can chmod the directories so they are only readable by root, then they won't show up in locate results. If you ever do want to find something in those directories, run locate as root. Jonathan -- http://jonathan.rawle.org/