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.
The GUI can also be used to manage the indexing operation. Stopping the indexer can be done from the recoll GUI → menu entry.
On Unix-like systems, 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 write data to disk (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end of the indexing pass will have been skipped (for example, the stemming and spelling databases will be inexistent or out of date).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 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.
