The recollindex program performs index updates. You can start it
either from the command line or from the
menu in the recoll GUI program. When started
from the GUI, the indexing will run on the same configuration recoll
was started on. When started from the command line, recollindex will
use the RECOLL_CONFDIR variable or accept a
-c confdir option to specify a non-default
configuration directory.
If the recoll program finds no index when it starts, it will automatically start indexing (except if canceled).
The GUI menu has entries to start or stop the current indexing operation. When indexing is not currently running, you have a choice between or . The first choice only processes changed files, the second one erases the index before starting so that all files are processed.
On Linux and Windows, the GUI can be used to manage the indexing operation. Stopping the indexer can be done from the recoll GUI → menu entry.
On Linux, the recollindex indexing process can be interrupted by sending an interrupt (Ctrl-C, SIGINT) or terminate (SIGTERM) signal.
When stopped, some time may elapse before recollindex exits, because it needs to properly flush and close the index.
After an interruption, the index will be somewhat inconsistent because some operations which are normally performed at the end of the indexing pass will have been skipped (for example, the stemming and spelling databases will be inexistent or out of date). You just need to restart indexing at a later time to restore consistency. The indexing will restart at the interruption point (the full file tree will be traversed, but files that were indexed up to the interruption and for which the index is still up to date will not need to be reindexed).
recollindex has many options which are listed in its manual page. Only a few will be described here.
Option -z will reset the index when
starting. This is almost the same as destroying the index
files (the nuance is that the Xapian format version will not
be changed).
Option -Z will force the update of all
documents without resetting the index first. This will not
have the "clean start" aspect of -z, but
the advantage is that the index will remain available for
querying while it is rebuilt, which can be a significant
advantage if it is very big (some installations need days
for a full index rebuild).
Option -k will force retrying files
which previously failed to be indexed, for example because
of a missing helper program.
Of special interest also, maybe, are
the -i and -f
options. -i allows indexing an explicit
list of files (given as command line parameters or read on
stdin). -f tells
recollindex to ignore file selection parameters from the
configuration. Together, these options allow building a custom file selection process
for some area of the file system, by adding the top directory to the
skippedPaths list and using an
appropriate file selection method to build the file list to
be fed to recollindex
-if. Trivial example:
find . -name indexable.txt -print | recollindex -if
recollindex -i will
not descend into subdirectories specified as parameters,
but just add them as index entries. It is
up to the external file selection method to build the complete
file list.
The most common way to set up indexing is to have a cron
task execute it every night. For example the following
crontab entry would do it every day at 3:30AM
(supposing recollindex is in your PATH):
30 3 * * * recollindex > /some/tmp/dir/recolltrace 2>&1
Or, using anacron:
1 15 su mylogin -c "recollindex recollindex > /tmp/rcltraceme 2>&1"
The Recoll GUI has dialogs to manage
crontab entries for
recollindex. You can reach them from the
→
menu. They only
work with the good old cron, and do not give
access to all features of cron
scheduling. Entries created via the tool are marked with
a RCLCRON_RCLINDEX= marker so that the tool
knows which entries belong to it. As a side effect, this sets an
environment variable for the process, but it's not actually used,
this is just a marker.
The usual command to edit your
crontab is crontab
-e (which will usually start the
vi editor to edit the file). You may have
more sophisticated tools available on your system.
Please be aware that there may be differences between your usual interactive command line environment and the one seen by crontab commands. Especially the PATH variable may be of concern. Please check the crontab manual pages about possible issues.
