Known bugs in current and older versions

Bugs that are listed in an older version section are supposedly fixed in later versions. Bugs listed in the topmost section may also exist in older versions.

recoll 1.18.1

Weird data in filter output text (e.g.: produced by some versions of pdftotext) can cause an error which will halt the processing of the document, which becomes unsearchable. This is a relatively uncommon problem which signals itself by a specific error in the indexing log, so you can know if you are affected. Look for: xapian add_posting error Empty termnames aren't allowed
Raw indexes (not default): diacritics and case expansion is not applied to terms containing numbers so that a case-insensitive search does not work for them (e.g.: searching for ds1820 will not find DS1820).
On systems such as Debian Stable which use Evince version 2.x (not 3.x) as PDF viewer, the default "Open" command for PDF files will not work. You need to edit the command: in Preferences->GUI configuration, uncheck Use desktop preferences..., then click Choose editor applications, and for application/pdf, application/postscript and text/dvi, change the --page-index option to --page-label.
It will sometimes happen that the result list paragraph format stored in the Qt preferences file will get garbled, causing result lists with no displayed paragraphs (the counts and pages are ok, the results can be seen in table mode, but not in list mode). The workaround is to go to
Preferences->Query configuration->User interface
and erase the result paragraph format string (^A DEL in the text area), this will reset the string to the default value.
Real time indexer: when running with gamin on FreeBSD, the indexer can deadlock in the gamin dialog in some cases.
After an upgrade, the recoll GUI sometimes crashes on startup. This is fixed by removing (back it up just in case) ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf, the QSettings storage for recoll.

recoll 1.18.0

Thumbnails are not found on newer desktops (e.g. Ubuntu Quantal) because of a change in the freedesktop.org "standard".
A bug in extracting search term from click data in the snippet window results in passing an incorrect term to the viewer. Only affects non-ascii terms.
Using the snippets window can sometimes crash the GUI.
Tilde expansion is not properly performed for the "beaglequeuedir" parameter. This only affects people who develop scripts over the queue feature.
The missing filter recording code is broken.
Opening embedded documents from the Unity Lens does not work.

recoll 1.17.3

Fixed in 1.17.4 and 1.18:

The real time monitor can be terminated for permissions-related addwatch errors that should be non-fatal.
text/plain files are sometimes opened as csv (using a spreadsheet...)
Tilde expansion was wrong for the beaglequeuedir/webqueuedir variable, causing problem when using the new Web history indexer module with 1.17.
Fixed relatively benign memory leak in the filters cache handler.
Prevent document indexing truncation caused by unac in some marginal case which became quite common with the recent versions of pdftotext.

Only fixed in the 1.18 branch:

Messages in Qt standard dialog messages are not translated.
The unac_except_trans mechanism can generate wrong character translations in some cases.
ODF documents exported by Google docs are badly processed.
It is impossible to open the parent of an embedded document (e.g. the CHM file for an HTML page inside the CHM) if the parent is itself a member of an archive.
Text inside malformed HTML files (appearing before a <body> tag, or after a second one, or after a </body> tag is not indexed. As it would be displayed by current browsers, this is wrong.

recoll 1.17.2

It appears that recollindex will sometimes crash while indexing mail files. There are 2 separate reports about this, and no resolution for now. This is not specific to 1.17 as one of the reports is for 1.16. Refs: Fedora (maildir, processing an attachment), Ubuntu: apparently (no stack trace): Recoll was indexing files in .thunderbird when the crash occurred. It seemed to be indexing the INBOX file on disk.
There were a few small glitches when paging the result list, for example going back from the last page.

recoll 1.17.1

You can crash the GUI by starting simultaneous queries, which could be accomplished among others by quickly clicking the sort order buttons.
When external indexes set as active are not actually present, the GUI fails to open the db. It should automatically inactivate them instead.
Does not display thumbnails for files with an URL which should be encoded (ie: with embedded spaces).
chm filter: url-encoded internal paths are mishandled.
Does not compile on Solaris (flock() issue).
The KDE recoll applet does not work.
configure --disable-python-module breaks the installation script.
The version string is not correctly updated for 1.17.1, the help dialog and recollindex -v will print 1.17.0.
The HTML output from Python (rclexecm) filters is not correctly escaped.
Does not compile with gcc 4.7 (missing include).

recoll 1.17.0

The chm filter handles badly some CHM files with encoded internal URLs (the whole file or some parts are not indexed). There is an updated filter on the filters section of the download page.

The application style sheet is not reapplied when changed from the preferences menu, you have to restart the GUI.

recoll 1.16.2

Real time indexer: directory moves are not handled at all. Workaround: restart indexer from time to time.

Real time indexer: file move events are not detected when running with inotify (at least for recent versions). Workaround: restart indexer from time to time.

Cancelling a preview in the GUI will also cancel the indexing thread if it is running.

Under Solaris, it is necessary to perform the initial indexing with the recollindex program. For some unknown reason, the recoll index thread does not work for creating the database. The only idea I have is a problem with exception handling (recoll catches an exception while trying the yet inexistant db).

recoll 1.16.1

At least on OpenSUSE 12.1 / Qt 4.7.4 (and probably other environments), the links to Preview or Open inside the result list do not work. Also the GUI can crash if a temporary directory creation fails.
The Python filters can crash under certain error conditions. This is a benign error, affecting just the current document, but it causes system reports.
The query is run 2 times, in most cases. This does not cause a too dramatic performance impact because of caching but still...
The output from some filters (most typically text files out from the zip filters) is sometimes not transcoded correctly to UTF-8, causing myriads of error messages (and a possible application crash due to another bug in the unac code, described further).
There is a compilation issue on Linux systems with a 3.x kernel.
Queries without search terms (ie: all files of a given mime type) fail with an "empty query" diagnostic.
The recollq command line query program sometimes does not clean up its temporary directory.
Indexing can crash on files with weird names (inconsistent with the locale) for which the format of the "file -i" command is unexpected. This is probably dependant on the type of system and/or locale. Workaround: arrange for the offending file not to be indexed (move it away or configure it out), or apply this patch, which should work with all versions from 1.13 to 1.16.1
Under certain conditions, the indexer can use all available memory and crash. This is caused by a memory leak in an error handling path inside unac, and can only be triggered in specific conditions (all cases seen were from files inside zip archives). Workaround: arrange for the offending file not to be indexed (move it away or configure it out), or apply this patch, which should work with all versions from 1.13 to 1.16.1
The lyx filter does not correctly detect the Lyx version, needed for correct indexing.
A typo in a memory reallocation call inside the firefox web history indexing module may cause problems in a highly improbable case.
Directory creations are not processed by the real time indexer (for indexing directory names).

recoll 1.16.0

The recoll GUI program sometimes crashes when running a query while the indexing thread is active. Possible workarounds:
- Upgrade to 1.16.1
- Use the command line recollindex program to perform indexing (usually just type "recollindex" in a console, or see "man recollindex").
- Do not run queries in recoll while the indexing thread is running (as indicated in the bottom status line).

recoll 1.15.7

The default filter for files in Microsoft Word format (application/msword, .doc), antiword, has trouble with some relatively rare files with a very small text, resulting in the following error message:
I'm afraid the text stream of this file is too small to handle.
Only small files produced by Microsoft Word on a Mac, or by OpenOffice will trigger this message.
Workaround: install wvWare and modify mimeconf to use the rcldoc filter (instead of directly executing antiword). Rcldoc will try antiword, then will use vwWare if it is available. This will result in slightly slower indexing for all normal .doc files. This fix was made the default in 1.16
Compressed man pages could not be previewed.
Sorting by document and file size in the result table does not work.
idxflushmb was not handled while deleting documents in the index, leading to almost unbounded memory usage.
Email messages for which there would be an error indexing an attachment would not be indexed at all.
Performing a full index with release 1.11 or newer, over a version created with a much older recoll release may sometimes end with an error saying "backend doesn't implement metadata". If this happens, you need to delete the index directory (typically ~/.recoll/xapiandb/) and restart indexing. For big indexes, to avoid losing time, removing the directory preventively may be preferable .
Text files bigger than 2 GB can not be indexed.
Using the GUI preview while the indexing thread is running will sometimes crash the GUI or provoke other strangeness. This happens much more rarely than in 1.15.7, but still occurs. Workaround if this happens too frequently: use the standalone recollindex program instead of the GUI thread.
Real time indexer: uncontrolled concurrent access to the global configuration can cause a startup crash (mostly of big file trees because of timing issues).
Using the result preview while the indexing thread is running will sometimes crash the GUI or provoke other strangeness. This is apparently due to insufficient protection of resources shared by several threads. After recent cleanup, the problem occurs quite seldom but it is not completely gone. The current and unsatisfying workaround, is to avoid the situation, for example by using the standalone recollindex program instead of the GUI indexing thread.
The GUI preview function sometimes fails with a non-sensical message about a non-related missing helper.
Most operations on the parent document in the result table view are not connected and do nothing.
The operations on the parent document in the result list right click menu (Preview and Open), do not work, they access the file's parent directory instead.
The GUI option to remember sort state between invocations only works for sort by date.
The rclzip filter can't handle utf-8 in path names for archive members. An updated filter is available.
The rclzip and rclchm filters can't handle archive members with a colon (':') in the file name or path. The files are normally indexed and can be searched for, but they can't be displayed (neither opened nor previewed). There is a patch which fixes the issue (then needs full reindex for these files).
The ignored suffixes list (recoll_noindex) is itself ignored in some cases.
The man filter creates groff temporary png files in the home directory.
Indexing can hang or crash after an error occurs on an archive member (which should have affected only the relevant document).
The initial indexing pass in the real-time indexer does not monitor the X11 session which can create problems if the user ends the section at this point.
Starting the indexing thread inside the GUI while another indexer (batch or real-time) is active will silently failed. It should show an error dialog.
When an open error occurs on an external index while starting the GUI, the initial indexing dialog is started, which is incorrect because it cannot fix the problem.
The result table row height is not adjusted according to default font size, and the vertical position of text in cells is often bad.

recoll 1.15.5

The Python and PHP modules in 1.15.5 have compile errors. This is solved by this simple change.

The current stemming language is not indicated by menu checkboxes.

recoll 1.15.2

If a result table column is both added and moved in the same GUI instance, the list becomes garbled (or/and the GUI crashes). Workaround: remove the Qt GUI config (.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf), and perform the operation in 2 GUI sessions: add column, exit recoll, restart, move column.
Clicking one of the category filter checkboxes (one of the media/message/text/... things) with an empty result list crashes the GUI (just like this, yeah, I know, quality insurance etc.). Workaround: don't click these before running the first query.
Changing the indexing configuration parameters from the GUI while the indexing thread (not an external recollindex command) is running will sometimes (quite often) crash the GUI.
Script files (ie: .sh .pl) indexed as text do not respect the maximum text file limit (a problem with, ie, shar archives identified as application/x-shellscript).
indexing script for xml formats (ie: svg) sometimes stall for 30 S while xsltproc tries to access remote dtds.
recollindex inapproprietely sets the nice value for its whole process group. In certain cases where the indexing monitor was launched at session start, this could set the whole session to low priority!

recoll 1.14.4

rclmon.sh stop would not work.
Some shell, awk, and perl scripts are not indexed. There is a simple configuration tweak workaround
The tree walk in indexing could loop on symbolic links.
If the user-chosen result list entry format results in several paragraphs (in the qt textedit sense), right clicks will only work inside the first one for each entry.

recoll 1.14.3

Email message preview is broken.

The new mutagen-based audio tags filter (rclaudio) only works with very recent mutagen versions. See here for a corrected version.

recoll 1.14.1

Compressed file view fix broke help viewer.

recoll 1.14.0

Does not compile with Xapian 1.2. Apply patch.

When a mime type has an external viewer defined, but the actual file is compressed (ie: xxx.txt.gz), recoll will try to start the external viewer on the compressed file, which will not work in most cases.

recoll 1.13.04

Note: some of the bugs listed here are not actually "fixed", mostly they were problems caused by old versions of external software (ie: kde, qt), and I stopped carrying them. Just don't use these versions, or live with the problem.

In case a new style filter (persistent) crashed while indexing, it was not restarted, and all further files of the same mime type were not updated (ie: python zip crash on encrypted files).

Mac OS X + Qt 4.6.1 : the index configuration dialog crashes. Fixed with Qt 4.7.

If you are seeing a delay of a few seconds before the result list displays for the first query of a recoll instance, try changing the result list font in the query preferences. This is not a recoll problem, I don't know the exact cause (I've seen it happen with "Sans Serif" and go away with Helvetica or Arial).

It seems that the recoll program sometimes segfaults when exiting after the first execution ?

When Recoll is built with qt 4.4.0, the icons in the result list are all displayed at the top of the page and garbled. This appears to be a qt bug, fixed in 4.4.1. Use either qt 4.3.x or 4.4.1 (stopped carrying this bug. Just don't use 4.4.0)

Under some versions of KDE (ie: Fedora FC5 KDE 3.5.4-0.5.fc5), there is a problem with the window stacking order. Opening the "browse" file selection dialog from the advanced search dialog will stack the latter under the main window, possibly making it invisible. This is quite probably a Kwin bug, possibly related to http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79183 or a correction thereof.

recoll 1.13.02

Stemming does not work in the 1.13 series. The stemming database was not created at all. Things would sort of work as long as an older stemming database was around (which is why this was not discovered earlier.

Fix the lyx filter to properly handle embedded white space in file paths.

recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16

The GUI display is garbled under Qt 4.6.1 and newer. This is a Qt bug, and a workaround was put in place in Recoll 1.13.02 for Qt 4.6.1. If you are using a newer version and the problem is still there, you can fix the 4.6.1 fix to hopefully work with your Qt version: edit qtgui/rclmain_w.h, around line 37 (there is only one instance), change:

  #if QT_VERSION == 0x040601
  to  
  #if QT_VERSION >= 0x040601

recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16

The field value was ignored in field searches for phrases or capitalized words (ie: author:John or title:"the title").

The GUI would sometimes crash during the first execution, after the dialog about starting configuration.

kio-recoll was not fully updated for 1.13 internals.

Would not compile on Solaris 8.

1.12.4

There are two bugs specific to 64 bits system, affecting HTML display inside the preview window (wrong character set used in some cases, and problems with keyword highlighting).

1.12.3

Specific File Name searches and Query Language searches for a 'filename:' field sometimes give different results due to the way we handle wild card expansion.

Killing recollindex sometimes left filter processes sleeping around.

The last entry in a configuration file was ignored if it was not followed by a newline (either the file had no ending newline or the line ended with backslash followed by the last file line.

Non-ascii characters in path names did not work well from the configuration GUI (editing the configuration files did work).

Accented characters in mail headers encoded according to a lax interpretation of rfc2047 were sometimes not decoded.

Recoll dumps core when exiting if the configuration was not found.

The Qt4 version sometimes did not display the status bar in the main window.

Message boundaries were not detected inside mbox format files with quoted strings inside the 'From ' lines. (ie [From "Smith, John" ...]).

The Term Explorer GUI dialog was not created at all if aspell was not compiled int (leaving no access to wildcard, regexp and stemming expansions).

Give priority to the user's PATH when looking for qmake (fixes detecting the wrong qmake when more than one exists).

1.12.2

The sort tool does not work with qt3 (at least some versions), the Apply button does nothing.

1.12.1

Uncatched Xapian exceptions can crash the GUI when a query is run while the index is being updated.

The result list right-click pop up menu does not appear when the cursor is inside a table.

Multithreaded access to Xlib can crash the real-time indexer.

A looping filter (ie: rclps trying to index loop.ps) can keep on running forever and stop the indexing while eating cpu.

Filter subprocesses can sometimes be left around after indexing is interrupted. Two signals are sometimes necessary to get recollindex to exit.

Signals SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 are not blocked.

Sort does not work on queries started from the command line.

1.12.0

To compile the Python interface for recoll 1.12, you need to edit setup.py and replace "rcldb/pathhash.cpp" with "utils/fileudi.cpp".
rclman outputs control characters, causing problems with preview and phrase searches in manual pages.
rcllyx has trouble with 8bit characters in file names.
"recoll -q ..." processes incorrectly second and further command line arguments.
The following problem was corrected by Xapian 1.0.11 or 1.0.12, and I can see no reason to use older versions and/or the patches below. However, they're kept around in case someone needs them.
NEAR expansion errors: recoll performs stemming expansion inside NEAR clauses (except if prevented by a capitalized entry). Because of a Xapian bug (up to 1.0.12 (or 11?)), NEAR does not support multiple OR subclauses. This manifests itself by a 'not implemented' Xapian exception or an explicit error message. Workarounds:
- Prevent expansion of NEAR terms (possibly except one) by capitalizing them.
- Or apply the following patch to xapian, inside the "api/" directory:
  0.x versions: xapian/xapNearDistrib-0.x.patch
  1.0.[0-9]: xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.0_9.patch
  1.0.10: xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.10.patch
  or fetch the already patched source from the local xapian/ directory then recompile, and install.

1.11.4

Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).
Incorrect handling of "accents" inside Japanese katakana text.
Using the "Erase history" command on an empty history would cause recoll to crash.

1.11.1

Unicode space characters like 0x3000, Ideographic space where not detected inside user entries like the main interface search entry. Badly parsed searches would retrieve no results, when the same search entered with ascii space characters would have succeeded.
Spaces were inserted inside CJK strings when building abstracts for the result list.
Accent removal should not be performed for Japanese.
When using the query language, an OR part with more than two terms will swallow preceding AND terms, one for each additional OR. Ex: (champagne ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx) will be interpreted as "champagne OR ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx" instead of the correct "champagne AND (ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx)" Workaround until the fix is issued: add non-existing terms before the OR part and check the resulting query: "champagne bogusxyztv ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx"
The "Copy file name" and "Copy URL" entries of the right-click menus only copy the data to the X11 primary selection (use middle-button click to paste). This is probably a mistake, the data should be copied to the clipboard too (permitting the use of the "Paste" edit menu entry or Ctrl+V in the target).
Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).

1.10.6

If the locale is not utf-8, non-ascii command line arguments to recoll and recollq are not converted to utf-8, which may prevent, for example, the kde applet from working. The workaround is to apply the following one-line fix to qtgui/main.cpp, recompile and install recoll:
```
            386c386
            <        sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromUtf8(qstring.c_str()));
            ---
            >        sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromLocal8Bit(qstring.c_str()));
          
```

1.10.1

A relatively simple error case can cause the indexer to stop processing an mbox file (forgetting all subsequent messages). More specifically, this happens when encountering more than than a few dozen errors while handling attachments. This is relatively common: for exemple if an external helper application is missing and multiple attachments of the affected type are found (ie: multiple images and no exiftool). Workaround: install the helper application.
The decoding of base-64 data in emails fails in a relatively uncommon but sometimes encountered case.
In a preview window, when walking the search term hits with the Previous/Next buttons, 'Previous' actually acts as 'Next' (it does work normally for the local search).
Problems in detecting message separators inside Thunderbird mailboxes (quite probably mainly for messages imported from outlook?). Can lead to unindexed messages, and even apparently indexer crashes in some cases.
File names indexed as terms can sometimes overflow the maximum term size, halting the indexing.
For Phrase/Near searches, only the first term group is highlighted in preview.

1.10.0

If a filter fails while trying to extract the data from a file, the file will not be indexed at all (not even the file name). The file name should be indexed in this case. This happens in particular in the very common case where the helper application is not installed (ie: missing Exiftool -> no *.jpg names in the index).
If several query language "ext:" qualifiers are specified, they will be joined by an AND instead of OR, resulting in no results. Using an explicit OR doesn't work (actually OR + field names is generally broken). In some cases, you can use a "type:" qualifier as a workaround.

1.9.x

Problems have been reported indexing big mailstores (several hundreds of thousands of messages): resulting in a very big database and even crashes.

1.8.2

Under ubuntu (at least, maybe debian too), the default awk interpreter (mawk) is ancient, and the recoll pdf input filter does not work (removes all space characters). This can be solved by installing the gawk package. $ apt-get install gawk $ update-alternatives --set awk /usr/bin/gawk
There are sometimes problems with document deletions: the index can get in a state where deleted or moved documents are not purged from the index (the log file says that the doc are deleted, but they aren't actually). When this happens, the only solution currently is to reindex from scratch (recollindex -z). This is due to a xapian bug, which is fixed in xapian 1.0.2, or you can apply the following patch to xapian 1.0.1 to fix it: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/xapian/xapian-delete-document.patch
The dates shown for email attachments in a result list are the email folder modification date. This should be inherited from the parent message instead.
There are a few problems in the qt4 version of recoll:
Some accelerators (esc-spc, ctl-arrow) do not work, neither do copy/paste between the result list and preview windows and x11 applications.
The qt4 q3textedit::find() method is extremely slow, so that positionning to first search term in Recoll preview has been disabled, and the application will sometimes appear to be looping when using the find feature in the preview window (it's not looping, it's searching...)

1.8.1

This is not really a bug but .beagle really should be included in "skippedNames", or you end up indexing the beagle text cache, which is not really desirable.
Doc bug: the manual states that the query language supports a "mime:" switch to filter mime types. There is currently no such thing.

1.7.5

Debian and Ubuntu: the rclsoff Openoffice filter doesn't work, because of an incorrect shell syntax (understood by bash but not sh). To fix, you edit /usr[/local]/share/recoll/filters/rclsoff and can change the line: trap cleanup EXIT SIGHUP SIGQUIT SIGINT SIGTERM into: trap cleanup EXIT HUP QUIT INT TERM or download the updated filter from the filters page: http://www.recoll.org/filters/filters.html

1.7.3

Processing will stop on first error while indexing an mbox file. This could happen just because an attachment could not be decoded, and can cause non-indexing of many messages. The most probable cause of error is a missing filter (ie for ms-word files), so the temporary workaround would be to install the missing filters. This bug is specific to 1.7 and 1.6 users need not worry. A correction will be issued very soon.
Messages of type multipart/signed are not indexed.

1.6.2

Relatively unfrequent issue with message boundary detection in mbox files, could cause miscellaneous problems.
Executing an external viewer for a file with single-quotes in the name would not work.

1.5.10

If a defaultcharset was set in the configuration file for a subdirectory, it would stay in effect for all subsequent files/directories (except if explicitely overridden), potentially causing many transcoding errors.

1.5.[1-7]

Dates in result list come from the file's ctimes, which may be confusing
Some rare MIME messages with null boundaries can crash the indexer.

1.5.0

Under some conditions, recoll startup and exit could be very slow: the simple search history list had serious problems with non-ascii strings, whose size sometimes doubled at each program startup/stop.

1.3.3

Several of the external filters did not handle path names with embedded spaces (rcluncomp rclsoff rclps rclmedia rcldjvu). This is fixed in 1.4.
If your QT installation is built with the QT_NO_STL flag, Recoll will not compile. I have a patch for this (will be fixed in the next release), contact me if you get the problem. Typical error message: main.cpp:160: error: no match for 'operator+=' in 'msg += reason'
The 'None of these words' field in the complex search does not work if there are no other filled fields (it transforms into an ordinary search). Workaround: enter very common term(s) in the 'any of these words' field.
Indexing cannot currently be conveniently and cleanly stopped when it's started. You can kill the process, and keyboard interrupt might work, but this may leave the database in a bad state. This is fixed in the upcoming release, there is no current workaround.

1.2.2

The preview window is supposed to scroll after loading the document so that the first search term is visible. This does not work in many cases.
The result list title is not shown for sorted lists Notes on older versions:
Trouble compiling on some linux systems (Gentoo and Slackware?). There existed a quite common issue where the Recoll link will fail trying to use a libstdc++.la file. This was due to a problem with the xapian-config program. A workaround has been included in the configure script for recoll 1.2.2, and the problem should not occur any more.
Case-insensitive search should now work in most cases (used to not work except for accented ascii).
All directories and files with names beginning with a dot were ignored by the skippedNames directive in the default recoll.conf file from older versions (no indexing of mozilla or thunderbird email !). An upgrade will not fix this (it will not modify an existing configuration). You need to edit recoll.conf by hand and remove the .* from skippedNames.