what is this program for exactly? ive had my n800 for about 2 weeks now and never had a problem until today its using 100% all the time

It does that from time to time. Before you know it your N800's battery is dead in the morning.

The metalayer-crawler is a program which crawls your SD cards and flash memory to find media files. I have no idea why that's even needed, as I don't seem to have any problems with my media player after I disabled the metalayer-crawler.

The reason I disabled it was because it ran wild and depleted my battery twice. This is how to disable it. You need xterm installed, and becomeroot.

(Note spelling of the script in /etc/init.d/)
The above should fix it, to be certain you may want to reboot. Check afterwards with 'ps -ef|grep metal' to see that it's not running anymore.

I did the above many months ago and haven't had any battery issues since.

will it go away or do i have to do that?

This is not a clean the wrong way to disable it; you should rather rename /etc/rc2.d/S99metalayer-crawler0:
It will cause problems until you disable it, at least under OS2007.

out of curiosity, if you disable it can you trigger a manual update easily?

Benson:

The way I disable it is perfectly clean, because the metalayer-startup script checks for the existence of /usr/sbin/metalayer-crawler and exits cleanly if it's not there.

pixelseventy2: Presumably it's possible to simply execute /usr/sbin/metalayer-crawler.disabled from the command line, as 'user' (not root), but I haven't tried. Particularly as I haven't figured out any point in running it..

Have you created any symbolic links in the filesystem recently? I had a similar problem with the metalayer crawler when I though it would be a good idea to link from the documents folder (accessible in the file manager) to the root folder: it means you can browse the whole filesystem from the file manager but really upsets the crawler.

Sorry, that was perhaps not the best way of wording it. Clean does imply a particular reason of undesirability, which is not perhaps the best in this state.

Things may exit cleanly that way, but it leaves the system in a non-standard state, with the possibility for future troubles from new and/or updated software.

But you've got a standard sysv init system; the thing to do is not to go around it, but to use it. Then the system is in a standard state, and no package can have troubles.

Even though I can agree with the sysv init aspect, there's nothing in the two different ways of disabling the crawler that is in any way better or worse for the package, certainly nothing that'll cause trouble with the debian packaging system. It'll be a hack any which way it's done, and there are other ways too. The way I would prefer is really to dpkg --purge the whole package, as to me it's mostly junk. Didn't try that though, so I don't know if something else is set to depend on it.

@ta-t3, without it, media player won't pick up new files, will it? I have an 8gb SD card just for music in my n800, and I periodically update the contents. canola rescanns att start, but I didn't think mediaplayyer did?