Indexing is always performed by the
recollindex program, which can be started
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 recollindex indexing process can be interrupted by sending an interrupt (Ctrl-C, SIGINT) or terminate (SIGTERM) signal. Some time may elapse before the process exits, because it needs to properly flush and close the index. This can also be done from the recoll GUI → menu entry.
After such 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end of the indexing pass will have been skipped (for example, the stemming and spelling databases will be inexistant or out of date).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 a number of other options which are described in its man 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.
