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More documentation can be found in the doc/ directory or at http://www.recoll.org
Recoll user manual
Jean-Francois Dockes
<jfd@recoll.org>
Copyright (c) 2005-2015 Jean-Francois Dockes
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any
later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the
license can be found at the following location: GNU web site.
This document introduces full text search notions and describes the
installation and use of the Recoll application. This version describes
Recoll 1.21.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Giving it a try
1.2. Full text search
1.3. Recoll overview
2. Indexing
2.1. Introduction
2.1.1. Indexing modes
2.1.2. Configurations, multiple indexes
2.1.3. Document types
2.1.4. Indexing failures
2.1.5. Recovery
2.2. Index storage
2.2.1. Xapian index formats
2.2.2. Security aspects
2.3. Index configuration
2.3.1. Multiple indexes
2.3.2. Index case and diacritics sensitivity
2.3.3. The index configuration GUI
2.4. Indexing WEB pages you wisit
2.5. Extended attributes data
2.6. Importing external tags
2.7. Periodic indexing
2.7.1. Running indexing
2.7.2. Using cron to automate indexing
2.8. Real time indexing
2.8.1. Slowing down the reindexing rate for fast
changing files
3. Searching
3.1. Searching with the Qt graphical user interface
3.1.1. Simple search
3.1.2. The default result list
3.1.3. The result table
3.1.4. Running arbitrary commands on result
files (1.20 and later)
3.1.5. Displaying thumbnails
3.1.6. The preview window
3.1.7. The Query Fragments window
3.1.8. Complex/advanced search
3.1.9. The term explorer tool
3.1.10. Multiple indexes
3.1.11. Document history
3.1.12. Sorting search results and collapsing
duplicates
3.1.13. Search tips, shortcuts
3.1.14. Saving and restoring queries (1.21 and
later)
3.1.15. Customizing the search interface
3.2. Searching with the KDE KIO slave
3.2.1. What's this
3.2.2. Searchable documents
3.3. Searching on the command line
3.4. Path translations
3.5. The query language
3.5.1. Modifiers
3.6. Search case and diacritics sensitivity
3.7. Anchored searches and wildcards
3.7.1. More about wildcards
3.7.2. Anchored searches
3.8. Desktop integration
3.8.1. Hotkeying recoll
3.8.2. The KDE Kicker Recoll applet
4. Programming interface
4.1. Writing a document input handler
4.1.1. Simple input handlers
4.1.2. "Multiple" handlers
4.1.3. Telling Recoll about the handler
4.1.4. Input handler HTML output
4.1.5. Page numbers
4.2. Field data processing
4.3. API
4.3.1. Interface elements
4.3.2. Python interface
5. Installation and configuration
5.1. Installing a binary copy
5.2. Supporting packages
5.3. Building from source
5.3.1. Prerequisites
5.3.2. Building
5.3.3. Installation
5.4. Configuration overview
5.4.1. Environment variables
5.4.2. The main configuration file, recoll.conf
5.4.3. The fields file
5.4.4. The mimemap file
5.4.5. The mimeconf file
5.4.6. The mimeview file
5.4.7. The ptrans file
5.4.8. Examples of configuration adjustments
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. Giving it a try
If you do not like reading manuals (who does?) but wish to give Recoll a
try, just install the application and start the recoll graphical user
interface (GUI), which will ask permission to index your home directory by
default, allowing you to search immediately after indexing completes.
Do not do this if your home directory contains a huge number of documents
and you do not want to wait or are very short on disk space. In this case,
you may first want to customize the configuration to restrict the indexed
area (for the very impatient with a completed package install, from the
recoll GUI: Preferences -> Indexing configuration, then adjust the Top
directories section).
Also be aware that you may need to install the appropriate supporting
applications for document types that need them (for example antiword for
Microsoft Word files).
1.2. Full text search
Recoll is a full text search application. Full text search finds your data
by content rather than by external attributes (like a file name). You
specify words (terms) which should or should not appear in the text you
are looking for, and receive in return a list of matching documents,
ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear first.
You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a
given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool
will return a list of documents where these terms are prominent, in a
similar way to Internet search engines.
Full text search applications try to determine which documents are most
relevant to the search terms you provide. Computer algorithms for
determining relevance can be very complex, and in general are inferior to
the power of the human mind to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of
relevance guessing is probably the most important aspect when evaluating a
search application.
In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a word, including
plurals, different tenses for a verb, or terms derived from the same root
or stem (example: floor, floors, floored, flooring...). Queries are
usually automatically expanded to all such related terms (words that
reduce to the same stem). This can be prevented for searching for a
specific form.
Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic
searches. A full text search application may also support this form of
approximation. For example, a search for aliterattion returning no result
may propose, depending on index contents, alliteration alteration
alterations altercation as possible replacement terms.
1.3. Recoll overview
Recoll uses the Xapian information retrieval library as its storage and
retrieval engine. Xapian is a very mature package using a sophisticated
probabilistic ranking model.
The Xapian library manages an index database which describes where terms
appear in your document files. It efficiently processes the complex
queries which are produced by the Recoll query expansion mechanism, and is
in charge of the all-important relevance computation task.
Recoll provides the mechanisms and interface to get data into and out of
the index. This includes translating the many possible document formats
into pure text, handling term variations (using Xapian stemmers), and
spelling approximations (using the aspell speller), interpreting user
queries and presenting results.
In a shorter way, Recoll does the dirty footwork, Xapian deals with the
intelligent parts of the process.
The Xapian index can be big (roughly the size of the original document
set), but it is not a document archive. Recoll can only display documents
that still exist at the place from which they were indexed. (Actually,
there is a way to reconstruct a document from the information in the
index, but the result is not nice, as all formatting, punctuation and
capitalization are lost).
Recoll stores all internal data in Unicode UTF-8 format, and it can index
files of many types with different character sets, encodings, and
languages into the same index. It can process documents embedded inside
other documents (for example a pdf document stored inside a Zip archive
sent as an email attachment...), down to an arbitrary depth.
Stemming is the process by which Recoll reduces words to their radicals so
that searching does not depend, for example, on a word being singular or
plural (floor, floors), or on a verb tense (flooring, floored). Because
the mechanisms used for stemming depend on the specific grammatical rules
for each language, there is a separate Xapian stemmer module for most
common languages where stemming makes sense.
Recoll stores the unstemmed versions of terms in the main index and uses
auxiliary databases for term expansion (one for each stemming language),
which means that you can switch stemming languages between searches, or
add a language without needing a full reindex.
Storing documents written in different languages in the same index is
possible, and commonly done. In this situation, you can specify several
stemming languages for the index.
Recoll currently makes no attempt at automatic language recognition, which
means that the stemmer will sometimes be applied to terms from other
languages with potentially strange results. In practise, even if this
introduces possibilities of confusion, this approach has been proven quite
useful, and it is much less cumbersome than separating your documents
according to what language they are written in.
Before version 1.18, Recoll stripped most accents and diacritics from
terms, and converted them to lower case before either storing them in the
index or searching for them. As a consequence, it was impossible to search
for a particular capitalization of a term (US / us), or to discriminate
two terms based on diacritics (sake / sake, mate / mate).
As of version 1.18, Recoll can optionally store the raw terms, without
accent stripping or case conversion. In this configuration, it is still
possible (and most common) for a query to be insensitive to case and/or
diacritics. Appropriate term expansions are performed before actually
accessing the main index. This is described in more detail in the section
about index case and diacritics sensitivity.
Recoll has many parameters which define exactly what to index, and how to
classify and decode the source documents. These are kept in configuration
files. A default configuration is copied into a standard location (usually
something like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples) during installation.
The default values set by the configuration files in this directory may be
overridden by values that you set inside your personal configuration,
found by default in the .recoll sub-directory of your home directory. The
default configuration will index your home directory with default
parameters and should be sufficient for giving Recoll a try, but you may
want to adjust it later, which can be done either by editing the text
files or by using configuration menus in the recoll GUI. Some other
parameters affecting only the recoll GUI are stored in the standard
location defined by Qt.
The indexing process is started automatically the first time you execute
the recoll GUI. Indexing can also be performed by executing the
recollindex command. Recoll indexing is multithreaded by default when
appropriate hardware resources are available, and can perform in parallel
multiple tasks among text extraction, segmentation and index updates.
Searches are usually performed inside the recoll GUI, which has many
options to help you find what you are looking for. However, there are
other ways to perform Recoll searches: mostly a command line interface, a
Python programming interface, a KDE KIO slave module, and Ubuntu Unity
Lens (for older versions) or Scope (for current versions) modules.
Chapter 2. Indexing
2.1. Introduction
Indexing is the process by which the set of documents is analyzed and the
data entered into the database. Recoll indexing is normally incremental:
documents will only be processed if they have been modified since the last
run. On the first execution, all documents will need processing. A full
index build can be forced later by specifying an option to the indexing
command (recollindex -z or -Z).
recollindex skips files which caused an error during a previous pass. This
is a performance optimization, and a new behaviour in version 1.21 (failed
files were always retried by previous versions). The command line option
-k can be set to retry failed files, for example after updating a filter.
The following sections give an overview of different aspects of the
indexing processes and configuration, with links to detailed sections.
Depending on your data, temporary files may be needed during indexing,
some of them possibly quite big. You can use the RECOLL_TMPDIR or TMPDIR
environment variables to determine where they are created (the default is
to use /tmp). Using TMPDIR has the nice property that it may also be taken
into account by auxiliary commands executed by recollindex.
2.1.1. Indexing modes
Recoll indexing can be performed along two different modes:
o Periodic (or batch) indexing: indexing takes place at discrete times,
by executing the recollindex command. The typical usage is to have a
nightly indexing run programmed into your cron file.
o Real time indexing: indexing takes place as soon as a file is created
or changed. recollindex runs as a daemon and uses a file system
alteration monitor such as inotify, Fam or Gamin to detect file
changes.
The choice between the two methods is mostly a matter of preference, and
they can be combined by setting up multiple indexes (ie: use periodic
indexing on a big documentation directory, and real time indexing on a
small home directory). Monitoring a big file system tree can consume
significant system resources.
The choice of method and the parameters used can be configured from the
recoll GUI: Preferences -> Indexing schedule
2.1.2. Configurations, multiple indexes
The parameters describing what is to be indexed and local preferences are
defined in text files contained in a configuration directory.
All parameters have defaults, defined in system-wide files.
Without further configuration, Recoll will index all appropriate files
from your home directory, with a reasonable set of defaults.
A default personal configuration directory ($HOME/.recoll/) is created
when a Recoll program is first executed. It is possible to create other
configuration directories, and use them by setting the RECOLL_CONFDIR
environment variable, or giving the -c option to any of the Recoll
commands.
In some cases, it may be interesting to index different areas of the file
system to separate databases. You can do this by using multiple
configuration directories, each indexing a file system area to a specific
database. Typically, this would be done to separate personal and shared
indexes, or to take advantage of the organization of your data to improve
search precision.
The generated indexes can be queried concurrently in a transparent manner.
For index generation, multiple configurations are totally independant from
each other. When multiple indexes need to be used for a single search,
some parameters should be consistent among the configurations.
2.1.3. Document types
Recoll knows about quite a few different document types. The parameters
for document types recognition and processing are set in configuration
files.
Most file types, like HTML or word processing files, only hold one
document. Some file types, like email folders or zip archives, can hold
many individually indexed documents, which may themselves be compound
ones. Such hierarchies can go quite deep, and Recoll can process, for
example, a LibreOffice document stored as an attachment to an email
message inside an email folder archived in a zip file...
Recoll indexing processes plain text, HTML, OpenDocument
(Open/LibreOffice), email formats, and a few others internally.
Other file types (ie: postscript, pdf, ms-word, rtf ...) need external
applications for preprocessing. The list is in the installation section.
After every indexing operation, Recoll updates a list of commands that
would be needed for indexing existing files types. This list can be
displayed by selecting the menu option File -> Show Missing Helpers in the
recoll GUI. It is stored in the missing text file inside the configuration
directory.
By default, Recoll will try to index any file type that it has a way to
read. This is sometimes not desirable, and there are ways to either
exclude some types, or on the contrary to define a positive list of types
to be indexed. In the latter case, any type not in the list will be
ignored.
Excluding types can be done by adding wildcard name patterns to the
skippedNames list, which can be done from the GUI Index configuration
menu. For versions 1.20 and later, you can alternatively set the
excludedmimetypes list in the configuration file. This can be redefined
for subdirectories.
You can also define an exclusive list of MIME types to be indexed (no
others will be indexed), by settting the indexedmimetypes configuration
variable. Example:
indexedmimetypes = text/html application/pdf
It is possible to redefine this parameter for subdirectories. Example:
[/path/to/my/dir]
indexedmimetypes = application/pdf
(When using sections like this, don't forget that they remain in effect
until the end of the file or another section indicator).
excludedmimetypes or indexedmimetypes, can be set either by editing the
main configuration file (recoll.conf), or from the GUI index configuration
tool.
2.1.4. Indexing failures
Indexing may fail for some documents, for a number of reasons: a helper
program may be missing, the document may be corrupt, we may fail to
uncompress a file because no file system space is available, etc.
Recoll versions prior to 1.21 always retried to index files which had
previously caused an error. This guaranteed that anything that may have
become indexable (for example because a helper had been installed) would
be indexed. However this was bad for performance because some indexing
failures may be quite costly (for example failing to uncompress a big file
because of insufficient disk space).
The indexer in Recoll versions 1.21 and later do not retry failed file by
default. Retrying will only occur if an explicit option (-k) is set on the
recollindex command line, or if a script executed when recollindex starts
up says so. The script is defined by a configuration variable
(checkneedretryindexscript), and makes a rather lame attempt at deciding
if a helper command may have been installed, by checking if any of the
common bin directories have changed.
2.1.5. Recovery
In the rare case where the index becomes corrupted (which can signal
itself by weird search results or crashes), the index files need to be
erased before restarting a clean indexing pass. Just delete the xapiandb
directory (see next section), or, alternatively, start the next
recollindex with the -z option, which will reset the database before
indexing.
2.2. Index storage
The default location for the index data is the xapiandb subdirectory of
the Recoll configuration directory, typically $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb/.
This can be changed via two different methods (with different purposes):
o You can specify a different configuration directory by setting the
RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable, or using the -c option to the
Recoll commands. This method would typically be used to index
different areas of the file system to different indexes. For example,
if you were to issue the following commands:
export RECOLL_CONFDIR=~/.indexes-email
recoll
Then Recoll would use configuration files stored in ~/.indexes-email/
and, (unless specified otherwise in recoll.conf) would look for the
index in ~/.indexes-email/xapiandb/.
Using multiple configuration directories and configuration options
allows you to tailor multiple configurations and indexes to handle
whatever subset of the available data you wish to make searchable.
o For a given configuration directory, you can specify a non-default
storage location for the index by setting the dbdir parameter in the
configuration file (see the configuration section). This method would
mainly be of use if you wanted to keep the configuration directory in
its default location, but desired another location for the index,
typically out of disk occupation concerns.
The size of the index is determined by the size of the set of documents,
but the ratio can vary a lot. For a typical mixed set of documents, the
index size will often be close to the data set size. In specific cases (a
set of compressed mbox files for example), the index can become much
bigger than the documents. It may also be much smaller if the documents
contain a lot of images or other non-indexed data (an extreme example
being a set of mp3 files where only the tags would be indexed).
Of course, images, sound and video do not increase the index size, which
means that nowadays (2012), typically, even a big index will be negligible
against the total amount of data on the computer.
The index data directory (xapiandb) only contains data that can be
completely rebuilt by an index run (as long as the original documents
exist), and it can always be destroyed safely.
2.2.1. Xapian index formats
Xapian versions usually support several formats for index storage. A given
major Xapian version will have a current format, used to create new
indexes, and will also support the format from the previous major version.
Xapian will not convert automatically an existing index from the older
format to the newer one. If you want to upgrade to the new format, or if a
very old index needs to be converted because its format is not supported
any more, you will have to explicitly delete the old index, then run a
normal indexing process.
Using the -z option to recollindex is not sufficient to change the format,
you will have to delete all files inside the index directory (typically
~/.recoll/xapiandb) before starting the indexing.
2.2.2. Security aspects
The Recoll index does not hold copies of the indexed documents. But it
does hold enough data to allow for an almost complete reconstruction. If
confidential data is indexed, access to the database directory should be
restricted.
Recoll (since version 1.4) will create the configuration directory with a
mode of 0700 (access by owner only). As the index data directory is by
default a sub-directory of the configuration directory, this should result
in appropriate protection.
If you use another setup, you should think of the kind of protection you
need for your index, set the directory and files access modes
appropriately, and also maybe adjust the umask used during index updates.
2.3. Index configuration
Variables set inside the Recoll configuration files control which areas of
the file system are indexed, and how files are processed. These variables
can be set either by editing the text files or by using the dialogs in the
recoll GUI.
The first time you start recoll, you will be asked whether or not you
would like it to build the index. If you want to adjust the configuration
before indexing, just click Cancel at this point, which will get you into
the configuration interface. If you exit at this point, recoll will have
created a ~/.recoll directory containing empty configuration files, which
you can edit by hand.
The configuration is documented inside the installation chapter of this
document, or in the recoll.conf(5) man page, but the most current
information will most likely be the comments inside the sample file. The
most immediately useful variable you may interested in is probably
topdirs, which determines what subtrees get indexed.
The applications needed to index file types other than text, HTML or email
(ie: pdf, postscript, ms-word...) are described in the external packages
section.
As of Recoll 1.18 there are two incompatible types of Recoll indexes,
depending on the treatment of character case and diacritics. The next
section describes the two types in more detail.
2.3.1. Multiple indexes
Multiple Recoll indexes can be created by using several configuration
directories which are usually set to index different areas of the file
system. A specific index can be selected for updating or searching, using
the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option to recoll and
recollindex.
A typical usage scenario for the multiple index feature would be for a
system administrator to set up a central index for shared data, that you
choose to search or not in addition to your personal data. Of course,
there are other possibilities. There are many cases where you know the
subset of files that should be searched, and where narrowing the search
can improve the results. You can achieve approximately the same effect
with the directory filter in advanced search, but multiple indexes will
have much better performance and may be worth the trouble.
A recollindex program instance can only update one specific index.
The main index (defined by RECOLL_CONFDIR or -c) is always active. If this
is undesirable, you can set up your base configuration to index an empty
directory.
The different search interfaces (GUI, command line, ...) have different
methods to define the set of indexes to be used, see the appropriate
section.
If a set of multiple indexes are to be used together for searches, some
configuration parameters must be consistent among the set. These are
parameters which need to be the same when indexing and searching. As the
parameters come from the main configuration when searching, they need to
be compatible with what was set when creating the other indexes (which
came from their respective configuration directories).
Most importantly, all indexes to be queried concurrently must have the
same option concerning character case and diacritics stripping, but there
are other constraints. Most of the relevant parameters are described in
the linked section.
2.3.2. Index case and diacritics sensitivity
As of Recoll version 1.18 you have a choice of building an index with
terms stripped of character case and diacritics, or one with raw terms.
For a source term of Resume, the former will store resume, the latter
Resume.
Each type of index allows performing searches insensitive to case and
diacritics: with a raw index, the user entry will be expanded to match all
case and diacritics variations present in the index. With a stripped
index, the search term will be stripped before searching.
A raw index allows for another possibility which a stripped index cannot
offer: using case and diacritics to discriminate between terms, returning
different results when searching for US and us or resume and resume. Read
the section about search case and diacritics sensitivity for more details.
The type of index to be created is controlled by the indexStripChars
configuration variable which can only be changed by editing the
configuration file. Any change implies an index reset (not automated by
Recoll), and all indexes in a search must be set in the same way (again,
not checked by Recoll).
If the indexStripChars is not set, Recoll 1.18 creates a stripped index by
default, for compatibility with previous versions.
As a cost for added capability, a raw index will be slightly bigger than a
stripped one (around 10%). Also, searches will be more complex, so
probably slightly slower, and the feature is still young, so that a
certain amount of weirdness cannot be excluded.
One of the most adverse consequence of using a raw index is that some
phrase and proximity searches may become impossible: because each term
needs to be expanded, and all combinations searched for, the
multiplicative expansion may become unmanageable.
2.3.3. The index configuration GUI
Most parameters for a given index configuration can be set from a recoll
GUI running on this configuration (either as default, or by setting
RECOLL_CONFDIR or the -c option.)
The interface is started from the Preferences -> Index Configuration menu
entry. It is divided in four tabs, Global parameters, Local parameters,
Web history (which is explained in the next section) and Search
parameters.
The Global parameters tab allows setting global variables, like the lists
of top directories, skipped paths, or stemming languages.
The Local parameters tab allows setting variables that can be redefined
for subdirectories. This second tab has an initially empty list of
customisation directories, to which you can add. The variables are then
set for the currently selected directory (or at the top level if the empty
line is selected).
The Search parameters section defines parameters which are used at query
time, but are global to an index and affect all search tools, not only the
GUI.
The meaning for most entries in the interface is self-evident and
documented by a ToolTip popup on the text label. For more detail, you will
need to refer to the configuration section of this guide.
The configuration tool normally respects the comments and most of the
formatting inside the configuration file, so that it is quite possible to
use it on hand-edited files, which you might nevertheless want to backup
first...
2.4. Indexing WEB pages you wisit
With the help of a Firefox extension, Recoll can index the Internet pages
that you visit. The extension was initially designed for the Beagle
indexer, but it has recently be renamed and better adapted to Recoll.
The extension works by copying visited WEB pages to an indexing queue
directory, which Recoll then processes, indexing the data, storing it into
a local cache, then removing the file from the queue.
This feature can be enabled in the GUI Index configuration panel, or by
editing the configuration file (set processwebqueue to 1).
A current pointer to the extension can be found, along with up-to-date
instructions, on the Recoll wiki.
A copy of the indexed WEB pages is retained by Recoll in a local cache
(from which previews can be fetched). The cache size can be adjusted from
the Index configuration / Web history panel. Once the maximum size is
reached, old pages are purged - both from the cache and the index - to
make room for new ones, so you need to explicitly archive in some other
place the pages that you want to keep indefinitely.
2.5. Extended attributes data
User extended attributes are named pieces of information that most modern
file systems can attach to any file.
Recoll versions 1.19 and later process extended attributes as document
fields by default. For older versions, this has to be activated at build
time.
A freedesktop standard defines a few special attributes, which are handled
as such by Recoll:
mime_type
If set, this overrides any other determination of the file MIME
type.
charset
If set, this defines the file character set (mostly useful for
plain text files).
By default, other attributes are handled as Recoll fields. On Linux, the
user prefix is removed from the name. This can be configured more
precisely inside the fields configuration file.
2.6. Importing external tags
During indexing, it is possible to import metadata for each file by
executing commands. For example, this could extract user tag data for the
file and store it in a field for indexing.
See the section about the metadatacmds field in the main configuration
chapter for more detail.
2.7. Periodic indexing
2.7.1. Running indexing
Indexing is always performed by the recollindex program, which can be
started either from the command line or from the File 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 File -> Stop
Indexing 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.
2.7.2. Using cron to automate indexing
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"
As of version 1.17 the Recoll GUI has dialogs to manage crontab entries
for recollindex. You can reach them from the Preferences -> Indexing
Schedule menu. They only work with the good old cron, and do not give
access to all features of cron scheduling.
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.
2.8. Real time indexing
Real time monitoring/indexing is performed by starting the recollindex -m
command. With this option, recollindex will detach from the terminal and
become a daemon, permanently monitoring file changes and updating the
index.
Under KDE, Gnome and some other desktop environments, the daemon can
automatically started when you log in, by creating a desktop file inside
the ~/.config/autostart directory. This can be done for you by the Recoll
GUI. Use the Preferences->Indexing Schedule menu.
With older X11 setups, starting the daemon is normally performed as part
of the user session script.
The rclmon.sh script can be used to easily start and stop the daemon. It
can be found in the examples directory (typically
/usr/local/[share/]recoll/examples).
For example, my out of fashion xdm-based session has a .xsession script
with the following lines at the end:
recollconf=$HOME/.recoll-home
recolldata=/usr/local/share/recoll
RECOLL_CONFDIR=$recollconf $recolldata/examples/rclmon.sh start
fvwm
The indexing daemon gets started, then the window manager, for which the
session waits.
By default the indexing daemon will monitor the state of the X11 session,
and exit when it finishes, it is not necessary to kill it explicitly. (The
X11 server monitoring can be disabled with option -x to recollindex).
If you use the daemon completely out of an X11 session, you need to add
option -x to disable X11 session monitoring (else the daemon will not
start).
By default, the messages from the indexing daemon will be setn to the same
file as those from the interactive commands (logfilename). You may want to
change this by setting the daemlogfilename and daemloglevel configuration
parameters. Also the log file will only be truncated when the daemon
starts. If the daemon runs permanently, the log file may grow quite big,
depending on the log level.
When building Recoll, the real time indexing support can be customised
during package configuration with the --with[out]-fam or
--with[out]-inotify options. The default is currently to include inotify
monitoring on systems that support it, and, as of Recoll 1.17, gamin
support on FreeBSD.
While it is convenient that data is indexed in real time, repeated
indexing can generate a significant load on the system when files such as
email folders change. Also, monitoring large file trees by itself
significantly taxes system resources. You probably do not want to enable
it if your system is short on resources. Periodic indexing is adequate in
most cases.
Increasing resources for inotify
On Linux systems, monitoring a big tree may need increasing the resources
available to inotify, which are normally defined in /etc/sysctl.conf.
### inotify
#
# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events - 16384
# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances - 128
# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches - 16384
#
# -- Change to:
#
fs.inotify.max_queued_events=32768
fs.notify.max_user_instances=256
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=32768
Especially, you will need to trim your tree or adjust the max_user_watches
value if indexing exits with a message about errno ENOSPC (28) from
inotify_add_watch.
2.8.1. Slowing down the reindexing rate for fast changing files
When using the real time monitor, it may happen that some files need to be
indexed, but change so often that they impose an excessive load for the
system.
Recoll provides a configuration option to specify the minimum time before
which a file, specified by a wildcard pattern, cannot be reindexed. See
the mondelaypatterns parameter in the configuration section.
Chapter 3. Searching
3.1. Searching with the Qt graphical user interface
The recoll program provides the main user interface for searching. It is
based on the Qt library.
recoll has two search modes:
o Simple search (the default, on the main screen) has a single entry
field where you can enter multiple words.
o Advanced search (a panel accessed through the Tools menu or the
toolbox bar icon) has multiple entry fields, which you may use to
build a logical condition, with additional filtering on file type,
location in the file system, modification date, and size.
In most cases, you can enter the terms as you think them, even if they
contain embedded punctuation or other non-textual characters. For example,
Recoll can handle things like email addresses, or arbitrary cut and paste
from another text window, punctation and all.
The main case where you should enter text differently from how it is
printed is for east-asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Words
composed of single or multiple characters should be entered separated by
white space in this case (they would typically be printed without white
space).
Some searches can be quite complex, and you may want to re-use them later,
perhaps with some tweaking. Recoll versions 1.21 and later can save and
restore searches, using XML files. See Saving and restoring queries.
3.1.1. Simple search
1. Start the recoll program.
2. Possibly choose a search mode: Any term, All terms, File name or Query
language.
3. Enter search term(s) in the text field at the top of the window.
4. Click the Search button or hit the Enter key to start the search.
The initial default search mode is Query language. Without special
directives, this will look for documents containing all of the search
terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores), just like the All
terms mode which will ignore such directives. Any term will search for
documents where at least one of the terms appear.
The Query Language features are described in a separate section.
All search modes allow wildcards inside terms (*, ?, []). You may want to
have a look at the section about wildcards for more information about
this.
File name will specifically look for file names. The point of having a
separate file name search is that wild card expansion can be performed
more efficiently on a small subset of the index (allowing wild cards on
the left of terms without excessive penality). Things to know:
o White space in the entry should match white space in the file name,
and is not treated specially.
o The search is insensitive to character case and accents, independantly
of the type of index.
o An entry without any wild card character and not capitalized will be
prepended and appended with '*' (ie: etc -> *etc*, but Etc -> etc).
o If you have a big index (many files), excessively generic fragments
may result in inefficient searches.
You can search for exact phrases (adjacent words in a given order) by
enclosing the input inside double quotes. Ex: "virtual reality".
When using a stripped index, character case has no influence on search,
except that you can disable stem expansion for any term by capitalizing
it. Ie: a search for floor will also normally look for flooring, floored,
etc., but a search for Floor will only look for floor, in any character
case. Stemming can also be disabled globally in the preferences. When
using a raw index, the rules are a bit more complicated.
Recoll remembers the last few searches that you performed. You can use the
simple search text entry widget (a combobox) to recall them (click on the
thing at the right of the text field). Please note, however, that only the
search texts are remembered, not the mode (all/any/file name).
Typing Esc Space while entering a word in the simple search entry will
open a window with possible completions for the word. The completions are
extracted from the database.
Double-clicking on a word in the result list or a preview window will
insert it into the simple search entry field.
You can cut and paste any text into an All terms or Any term search field,
punctuation, newlines and all - except for wildcard characters (single ?
characters are ok). Recoll will process it and produce a meaningful
search. This is what most differentiates this mode from the Query Language
mode, where you have to care about the syntax.
You can use the Tools -> Advanced search dialog for more complex searches.
3.1.2. The default result list
After starting a search, a list of results will instantly be displayed in
the main list window.
By default, the document list is presented in order of relevance (how well
the system estimates that the document matches the query). You can sort
the result by ascending or descending date by using the vertical arrows in
the toolbar.
Clicking on the Preview link for an entry will open an internal preview
window for the document. Further Preview clicks for the same search will
open tabs in the existing preview window. You can use Shift+Click to force
the creation of another preview window, which may be useful to view the
documents side by side. (You can also browse successive results in a
single preview window by typing Shift+ArrowUp/Down in the window).
Clicking the Open link will start an external viewer for the document. By
default, Recoll lets the desktop choose the appropriate application for
most document types (there is a short list of exceptions, see further). If
you prefer to completely customize the choice of applications, you can
uncheck the Use desktop preferences option in the GUI preferences dialog,
and click the Choose editor applications button to adjust the predefined
Recoll choices. The tool accepts multiple selections of MIME types (e.g.
to set up the editor for the dozens of office file types).
Even when Use desktop preferences is checked, there is a small list of
exceptions, for MIME types where the Recoll choice should override the
desktop one. These are applications which are well integrated with Recoll,
especially evince for viewing PDF and Postscript files because of its
support for opening the document at a specific page and passing a search
string as an argument. Of course, you can edit the list (in the GUI
preferences) if you would prefer to lose the functionality and use the
standard desktop tool.
You may also change the choice of applications by editing the mimeview
configuration file if you find this more convenient.
Each result entry also has a right-click menu with an Open With entry.
This lets you choose an application from the list of those which
registered with the desktop for the document MIME type.
The Preview and Open edit links may not be present for all entries,
meaning that Recoll has no configured way to preview a given file type
(which was indexed by name only), or no configured external editor for the
file type. This can sometimes be adjusted simply by tweaking the mimemap
and mimeview configuration files (the latter can be modified with the user
preferences dialog).
The format of the result list entries is entirely configurable by using
the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to
see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other
processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window
will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in
the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the
bottom of the page to browse the results.
3.1.2.1. No results: the spelling suggestions
When a search yields no result, and if the aspell dictionary is
configured, Recoll will try to check for misspellings among the query
terms, and will propose lists of replacements. Clicking on one of the
suggestions will replace the word and restart the search. You can hold any
of the modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, etc.) while clicking if you would
rather stay on the suggestion screen because several terms need
replacement.
3.1.2.2. The result list right-click menu
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by
right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the
following entries:
o Preview
o Open
o Open With
o Run Script
o Copy File Name
o Copy Url
o Save to File
o Find similar
o Preview Parent document
o Open Parent document
o Open Snippets Window
The Preview and Open entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
Open With lets you open the document with one of the applications claiming
to be able to handle its MIME type (the information comes from the
.desktop files in /usr/share/applications).
Run Script allows starting an arbitrary command on the result file. It
will only appear for results which are top-level files. See further for a
more detailed description.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard,
for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen
file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to
an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email
attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no
associated editor.
The Open/Preview Parent document entries allow working with the higher
level document (e.g. the email message an attachment comes from). Recoll
is sometimes not totally accurate as to what it can or can't do in this
area. For example the Parent entry will also appear for an email which is
part of an mbox folder file, but you can't actually visualize the mbox
(there will be an error dialog if you try).
If the document is a top-level file, Open Parent will start the default
file manager on the enclosing filesystem directory.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the
current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then
start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to
the current result. I can't remember a single instance where this function
was actually useful to me...
The Open Snippets Window entry will only appear for documents which
support page breaks (typically PDF, Postscript, DVI). The snippets window
lists extracts from the document, taken around search terms occurrences,
along with the corresponding page number, as links which can be used to
start the native viewer on the appropriate page. If the viewer supports
it, its search function will also be primed with one of the search terms.
3.1.3. The result table
In Recoll 1.15 and newer, the results can be displayed in spreadsheet-like
fashion. You can switch to this presentation by clicking the table-like
icon in the toolbar (this is a toggle, click again to restore the list).
Clicking on the column headers will allow sorting by the values in the
column. You can click again to invert the order, and use the header
right-click menu to reset sorting to the default relevance order (you can
also use the sort-by-date arrows to do this).
Both the list and the table display the same underlying results. The sort
order set from the table is still active if you switch back to the list
mode. You can click twice on a date sort arrow to reset it from there.
The header right-click menu allows adding or deleting columns. The columns
can be resized, and their order can be changed (by dragging). All the
changes are recorded when you quit recoll
Hovering over a table row will update the detail area at the bottom of the
window with the corresponding values. You can click the row to freeze the
display. The bottom area is equivalent to a result list paragraph, with
links for starting a preview or a native application, and an equivalent
right-click menu. Typing Esc (the Escape key) will unfreeze the display.
3.1.4. Running arbitrary commands on result files (1.20 and later)
Apart from the Open and Open With operations, which allow starting an
application on a result document (or a temporary copy), based on its MIME
type, it is also possible to run arbitrary commands on results which are
top-level files, using the Run Script entry in the results pop-up menu.
The commands which will appear in the Run Script submenu must be defined
by .desktop files inside the scripts subdirectory of the current
configuration directory.
Here follows an example of a .desktop file, which could be named for
example, ~/.recoll/scripts/myscript.desktop (the exact file name inside
the directory is irrelevant):
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=MyFirstScript
Exec=/home/me/bin/tryscript %F
MimeType=*/*
The Name attribute defines the label which will appear inside the Run
Script menu. The Exec attribute defines the program to be run, which does
not need to actually be a script, of course. The MimeType attribute is not
used, but needs to exist.
The commands defined this way can also be used from links inside the
result paragraph.
As an example, it might make sense to write a script which would move the
document to the trash and purge it from the Recoll index.
3.1.5. Displaying thumbnails
The default format for the result list entries and the detail area of the
result table display an icon for each result document. The icon is either
a generic one determined from the MIME type, or a thumbnail of the
document appearance. Thumbnails are only displayed if found in the
standard freedesktop location, where they would typically have been
created by a file manager.
Recoll has no capability to create thumbnails. A relatively simple trick
is to use the Open parent document/folder entry in the result list popup
menu. This should open a file manager window on the containing directory,
which should in turn create the thumbnails (depending on your settings).
Restarting the search should then display the thumbnails.
There are also some pointers about thumbnail generation on the Recoll
wiki.
3.1.6. The preview window
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the
result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the
existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which
will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview
window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing Ctrl-W (Ctrl + W) in the window.
Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager
button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list
inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the
arrow keys).
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying
the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie:
author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term
match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields. In the case
of images, you can switch between three displays: the image itself, the
image metadata as extracted by exiftool and the fields, which is the
metadata stored in the index.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing Ctrl-P (Ctrl +
P) in the window text.
3.1.6.1. Searching inside the preview
The preview window has an internal search capability, mostly controlled by
the panel at the bottom of the window, which works in two modes: as a
classical editor incremental search, where we look for the text entered in
the entry zone, or as a way to walk the matches between the document and
the Recoll query that found it.
Incremental text search
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You
initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) or CTL-F inside
the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and
entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous
buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3
inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use Ctrl-Up/Ctrl-Down
to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive
document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at
the first occurrence of the search string.
Walking the match lists
If the entry area is empty when you click the Next or Previous
buttons, the editor will be scrolled to show the next match to any
search term (the next highlighted zone). If you select a search
group from the dropdown list and click Next or Previous, the match
list for this group will be walked. This is not the same as a text
search, because the occurences will include non-exact matches (as
caused by stemming or wildcards). The search will revert to the
text mode as soon as you edit the entry area.
3.1.7. The Query Fragments window
Selecting the Tools -> Query Fragments menu entry will open a window with
radio- and check-buttons which can be used to activate query language
fragments for filtering the current query. This can be useful if you have
frequent reusable selectors, for example, filtering on alternate
directories, or searching just one category of files, not covered by the
standard category selectors.
The contents of the window are entirely customizable, and defined by the
contents of the fragbuts.xml file inside the configuration directory. The
sample file distributed with Recoll (which you should be able to find
under /usr/share/recoll/examples/fragbuts.xml), contains an example which
filters the results from the WEB history.
Here follows an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fragbuts version="1.0">
<radiobuttons>
<fragbut>
<label>Include Web Results</label>
<frag></frag>
</fragbut>
<fragbut>
<label>Exclude Web Results</label>
<frag>-rclbes:BGL</frag>
</fragbut>
<fragbut>
<label>Only Web Results</label>
<frag>rclbes:BGL</frag>
</fragbut>
</radiobuttons>
<buttons>
<fragbut>
<label>Year 2010</label>
<frag>date:2010-01-01/2010-12-31</frag>
</fragbut>
<fragbut>
<label>My Great Directory Only</label>
<frag>dir:/my/great/directory</frag>
</fragbut>
</buttons>
</fragbuts>
Each radiobuttons or buttons section defines a line of checkbuttons or
radiobuttons inside the window. Any number of buttons can be selected, but
the radiobuttons in a line are exclusive.
Each fragbut section defines the label for a button, and the Query
Language fragment which will be added (as an AND filter) before performing
the query if the button is active.
This feature is new in Recoll 1.20, and will probably be refined depending
on user feedback.
3.1.8. Complex/advanced search
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries without
memorizing the search language constructs. It can be opened through the
Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
Recoll keeps a history of searches. See Advanced search history.
The dialog has two tabs:
1. The first tab lets you specify terms to search for, and permits
specifying multiple clauses which are combined to build the search.
2. The second tab lets filter the results according to file size, date of
modification, MIME type, or location.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type
Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window
always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see
the query expansion.
3.1.8.1. Avanced search: the "find" tab
This part of the dialog lets you constructc a query by combining multiple
clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the
following modes:
o All terms.
o Any term.
o None of the terms.
o Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
o Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
o Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND
or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All
clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single
words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard
expansion will be performed as for simple search.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways,
with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the
words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words
may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to
adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match).
For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched
if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for
quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox.
With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity
search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and
also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
3.1.8.2. Avanced search: the "filter" tab
This part of the dialog has several sections which allow filtering the
results of a search according to a number of criteria
o The first section allows filtering by dates of last modification. You
can specify both a minimum and a maximum date. The initial values are
set according to the oldest and newest documents found in the index.
o The next section allows filtering the results by file size. There are
two entries for minimum and maximum size. Enter decimal numbers. You
can use suffix multipliers: k/K, m/M, g/G, t/T for 1E3, 1E6, 1E9, 1E12
respectively.
o The next section allows filtering the results by their MIME types, or
MIME categories (ie: media/text/message/etc.).
You can transfer the types between two boxes, to define which will be
included or excluded by the search.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the
file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the
lists will be in the restored state).
o The bottom section allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree
of the indexed area. You can use the Invert checkbox to search for
files not in the sub-tree instead. If you use directory filtering
often and on big subsets of the file system, you may think of setting
up multiple indexes instead, as the performance may be better.
You can use relative/partial paths for filtering. Ie, entering
dirA/dirB would match either /dir1/dirA/dirB/myfile1 or
/dir2/dirA/dirB/someother/myfile2.
3.1.8.3. Avanced search history
The advanced search tool memorizes the last 100 searches performed. You
can walk the saved searches by using the up and down arrow keys while the
keyboard focus belongs to the advanced search dialog.
The complex search history can be erased, along with the one for simple
search, by selecting the File -> Erase Search History menu entry.
3.1.9. The term explorer tool
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their
derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other
cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not
remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The search will only propose replacement terms with spelling variations
when no matching document were found. In some cases, both proper spellings
and mispellings are present in the index, and it may be interesting to
look for them explicitely.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term
explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index
terms list. It has three modes of operations:
Wildcard
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with
shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index
terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
Regular expression
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example:
word[0-9]+. The expression is implicitely anchored at the
beginning. Ie: press will match pression but not expression. You
can use .*press to match the latter, but be aware that this will
cause a full index term list scan, which can be quite long.
Stem expansion
This mode will perform the usual stem expansion normally done as
part user input processing. As such it is probably mostly useful
to demonstrate the process.
Spelling/Phonetic
In this mode, you enter the term as you think it is spelled, and
Recoll will do its best to find index terms that sound like your
entry. This mode uses the Aspell spelling application, which must
be installed on your system for things to work (if your documents
contain non-ascii characters, Recoll needs an aspell version newer
than 0.60 for UTF-8 support). The language which is used to build
the dictionary out of the index terms (which is done at the end of
an indexing pass) is the one defined by your NLS environment.
Weird things will probably happen if languages are mixed up.
Note that in cases where Recoll does not know the beginning of the string
to search for (ie a wildcard expression like *coll), the expansion can
take quite a long time because the full index term list will have to be
processed. The expansion is currently limited at 10000 results for
wildcards and regular expressions. It is possible to change the limit in
the configuration file.
Double-clicking on a term in the result list will insert it into the
simple search entry field. You can also cut/paste between the result list
and any entry field (the end of lines will be taken care of).
3.1.10. Multiple indexes
See the section describing the use of multiple indexes for generalities.
Only the aspects concerning the recoll GUI are described here.
A recoll program instance is always associated with a specific index,
which is the one to be updated when requested from the File menu, but it
can use any number of Recoll indexes for searching. The external indexes
can be selected through the external indexes tab in the preferences
dialog.
Index selection is performed in two phases. A set of all usable indexes
must first be defined, and then the subset of indexes to be used for
searching. These parameters are retained across program executions (there
are kept separately for each Recoll configuration). The set of all indexes
is usually quite stable, while the active ones might typically be adjusted
quite frequently.
The main index (defined by RECOLL_CONFDIR) is always active. If this is
undesirable, you can set up your base configuration to index an empty
directory.
When adding a new index to the set, you can select either a Recoll
configuration directory, or directly a Xapian index directory. In the
first case, the Xapian index directory will be obtained from the selected
configuration.
As building the set of all indexes can be a little tedious when done
through the user interface, you can use the RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS environment
variable to provide an initial set. This might typically be set up by a
system administrator so that every user does not have to do it. The
variable should define a colon-separated list of index directories, ie:
export RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS=/some/place/xapiandb:/some/other/db
Another environment variable, RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS allows adding to the
active list of indexes. This variable was suggested and implemented by a
Recoll user. It is mostly useful if you use scripts to mount external
volumes with Recoll indexes. By using RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS and
RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS, you can add and activate the index for the
mounted volume when starting recoll.
RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS is available for Recoll versions 1.17.2 and later.
A change was made in the same update so that recoll will automatically
deactivate unreachable indexes when starting up.
3.1.11. Document history
Documents that you actually view (with the internal preview or an external
tool) are entered into the document history, which is remembered.
You can display the history list by using the Tools/Doc History menu
entry.
You can erase the document history by using the Erase document history
entry in the File menu.
3.1.12. Sorting search results and collapsing duplicates
The documents in a result list are normally sorted in order of relevance.
It is possible to specify a different sort order, either by using the
vertical arrows in the GUI toolbox to sort by date, or switching to the
result table display and clicking on any header. The sort order chosen
inside the result table remains active if you switch back to the result
list, until you click one of the vertical arrows, until both are unchecked
(you are back to sort by relevance).
Sort parameters are remembered between program invocations, but result
sorting is normally always inactive when the program starts. It is
possible to keep the sorting activation state between program invocations
by checking the Remember sort activation state option in the preferences.
It is also possible to hide duplicate entries inside the result list
(documents with the exact same contents as the displayed one). The test of
identity is based on an MD5 hash of the document container, not only of
the text contents (so that ie, a text document with an image added will
not be a duplicate of the text only). Duplicates hiding is controlled by
an entry in the GUI configuration dialog, and is off by default.
As of release 1.19, when a result document does have undisplayed
duplicates, a Dups link will be shown with the result list entry. Clicking
the link will display the paths (URLs + ipaths) for the duplicate entries.
3.1.13. Search tips, shortcuts
3.1.13.1. Terms and search expansion
Term completion. Typing Esc Space in the simple search entry field while
entering a word will either complete the current word if its beginning
matches a unique term in the index, or open a window to propose a list of
completions.
Picking up new terms from result or preview text. Double-clicking on a
word in the result list or in a preview window will copy it to the simple
search entry field.
Wildcards. Wildcards can be used inside search terms in all forms of
searches. More about wildcards.
Automatic suffixes. Words like odt or ods can be automatically turned into
query language ext:xxx clauses. This can be enabled in the Search
preferences panel in the GUI.
Disabling stem expansion. Entering a capitalized word in any search field
will prevent stem expansion (no search for gardening if you enter Garden
instead of garden). This is the only case where character case should make
a difference for a Recoll search. You can also disable stem expansion or
change the stemming language in the preferences.
Finding related documents. Selecting the Find similar documents entry in
the result list paragraph right-click menu will select a set of
"interesting" terms from the current result, and insert them into the
simple search entry field. You can then possibly edit the list and start a
search to find documents which may be apparented to the current result.
File names. File names are added as terms during indexing, and you can
specify them as ordinary terms in normal search fields (Recoll used to
index all directories in the file path as terms. This has been abandoned
as it did not seem really useful). Alternatively, you can use the specific
file name search which will only look for file names, and may be faster
than the generic search especially when using wildcards.
3.1.13.2. Working with phrases and proximity
Phrases and Proximity searches. A phrase can be looked for by enclosing it
in double quotes. Example: "user manual" will look only for occurrences of
user immediately followed by manual. You can use the This phrase field of
the advanced search dialog to the same effect. Phrases can be entered
along simple terms in all simple or advanced search entry fields (except
This exact phrase).
AutoPhrases. This option can be set in the preferences dialog. If it is
set, a phrase will be automatically built and added to simple searches
when looking for Any terms. This will not change radically the results,
but will give a relevance boost to the results where the search terms
appear as a phrase. Ie: searching for virtual reality will still find all
documents where either virtual or reality or both appear, but those which
contain virtual reality should appear sooner in the list.
Phrase searches can strongly slow down a query if most of the terms in the
phrase are common. This is why the autophrase option is off by default for
Recoll versions before 1.17. As of version 1.17, autophrase is on by
default, but very common terms will be removed from the constructed
phrase. The removal threshold can be adjusted from the search preferences.
Phrases and abbreviations. As of Recoll version 1.17, dotted abbreviations
like I.B.M. are also automatically indexed as a word without the dots:
IBM. Searching for the word inside a phrase (ie: "the IBM company") will
only match the dotted abrreviation if you increase the phrase slack (using
the advanced search panel control, or the o query language modifier).
Literal occurences of the word will be matched normally.
3.1.13.3. Others
Using fields. You can use the query language and field specifications to
only search certain parts of documents. This can be especially helpful
with email, for example only searching emails from a specific originator:
search tips from:helpfulgui
Ajusting the result table columns. When displaying results in table mode,
you can use a right click on the table headers to activate a pop-up menu
which will let you adjust what columns are displayed. You can drag the
column headers to adjust their order. You can click them to sort by the
field displayed in the column. You can also save the result list in CSV
format.
Changing the GUI geometry. It is possible to configure the GUI in wide
form factor by dragging the toolbars to one of the sides (their location
is remembered between sessions), and moving the category filters to a menu
(can be set in the Preferences -> GUI configuration -> User interface
panel).
Query explanation. You can get an exact description of what the query
looked for, including stem expansion, and Boolean operators used, by
clicking on the result list header.
Advanced search history. As of Recoll 1.18, you can display any of the
last 100 complex searches performed by using the up and down arrow keys
while the advanced search panel is active.
Browsing the result list inside a preview window. Entering Shift-Down or
Shift-Up (Shift + an arrow key) in a preview window will display the next
or the previous document from the result list. Any secondary search
currently active will be executed on the new document.
Scrolling the result list from the keyboard. You can use PageUp and
PageDown to scroll the result list, Shift+Home to go back to the first
page. These work even while the focus is in the search entry.
Result table: moving the focus to the table. You can use Ctrl-r to move
the focus from the search entry to the table, and then use the arrow keys
to change the current row. Ctrl-Shift-s returns to the search.
Result table: open / preview. With the focus in the result table, you can
use Ctrl-o to open the document from the current row, Ctrl-Shift-o to open
the document and close recoll, Ctrl-d to preview the document.
Editing a new search while the focus is not in the search entry. You can
use the Ctrl-Shift-S shortcut to return the cursor to the search entry
(and select the current search text), while the focus is anywhere in the
main window.
Forced opening of a preview window. You can use Shift+Click on a result
list Preview link to force the creation of a preview window instead of a
new tab in the existing one.
Closing previews. Entering Ctrl-W in a tab will close it (and, for the
last tab, close the preview window). Entering Esc will close the preview
window and all its tabs.
Printing previews. Entering Ctrl-P in a preview window will print the
currently displayed text.
Quitting. Entering Ctrl-Q almost anywhere will close the application.
3.1.14. Saving and restoring queries (1.21 and later)
Both simple and advanced query dialogs save recent history, but the amount
is limited: old queries will eventually be forgotten. Also, important
queries may be difficult to find among others. This is why both types of
queries can also be explicitely saved to files, from the GUI menus: File
-> Save last query / Load last query
The default location for saved queries is a subdirectory of the current
configuration directory, but saved queries are ordinary files and can be
written or moved anywhere.
Some of the saved query parameters are part of the preferences (e.g.
autophrase or the active external indexes), and may differ when the query
is loaded from the time it was saved. In this case, Recoll will warn of
the differences, but will not change the user preferences.
3.1.15. Customizing the search interface
You can customize some aspects of the search interface by using the GUI
configuration entry in the Preferences menu.
There are several tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself,
the parameters used for searching and returning results, and what indexes
are searched.
User interface parameters:
o Highlight color for query terms: Terms from the user query are
highlighted in the result list samples and the preview window. The
color can be chosen here. Any Qt color string should work (ie red,
#ff0000). The default is blue.
o Style sheet: The name of a Qt style sheet text file which is applied
to the whole Recoll application on startup. The default value is
empty, but there is a skeleton style sheet (recoll.qss) inside the
/usr/share/recoll/examples directory. Using a style sheet, you can
change most recoll graphical parameters: colors, fonts, etc. See the
sample file for a few simple examples.
You should be aware that parameters (e.g.: the background color) set
inside the Recoll GUI style sheet will override global system
preferences, with possible strange side effects: for example if you
set the foreground to a light color and the background to a dark one
in the desktop preferences, but only the background is set inside the
Recoll style sheet, and it is light too, then text will appear
light-on-light inside the Recoll GUI.
o Maximum text size highlighted for preview Inserting highlights on
search term inside the text before inserting it in the preview window
involves quite a lot of processing, and can be disabled over the given
text size to speed up loading.
o Prefer HTML to plain text for preview if set, Recoll will display HTML
as such inside the preview window. If this causes problems with the Qt
HTML display, you can uncheck it to display the plain text version
instead.
o Plain text to HTML line style: when displaying plain text inside the
preview window, Recoll tries to preserve some of the original text
line breaks and indentation. It can either use PRE HTML tags, which
will well preserve the indentation but will force horizontal scrolling
for long lines, or use BR tags to break at the original line breaks,
which will let the editor introduce other line breaks according to the
window width, but will lose some of the original indentation. The
third option has been available in recent releases and is probably now
the best one: use PRE tags with line wrapping.
o Use desktop preferences to choose document editor: if this is checked,
the xdg-open utility will be used to open files when you click the
Open link in the result list, instead of the application defined in
mimeview. xdg-open will in term use your desktop preferences to choose
an appropriate application.
o Exceptions: when using the desktop preferences for opening documents,
these are MIME types that will still be opened according to Recoll
preferences. This is useful for passing parameters like page numbers
or search strings to applications that support them (e.g. evince).
This cannot be done with xdg-open which only supports passing one
parameter.
o Choose editor applications this will let you choose the command
started by the Open links inside the result list, for specific
document types.
o Display category filter as toolbar... this will let you choose if the
document categories are displayed as a list or a set of buttons.
o Auto-start simple search on white space entry: if this is checked, a
search will be executed each time you enter a space in the simple
search input field. This lets you look at the result list as you enter
new terms. This is off by default, you may like it or not...
o Start with advanced search dialog open : If you use this dialog
frequently, checking the entries will get it to open when recoll
starts.
o Remember sort activation state if set, Recoll will remember the sort
tool stat between invocations. It normally starts with sorting
disabled.
Result list parameters:
o Number of results in a result page
o Result list font: There is quite a lot of information shown in the
result list, and you may want to customize the font and/or font size.
The rest of the fonts used by Recoll are determined by your generic Qt
config (try the qtconfig command).
o Edit result list paragraph format string: allows you to change the
presentation of each result list entry. See the result list
customisation section.
o Edit result page HTML header insert: allows you to define text
inserted at the end of the result page HTML header. More detail in the
result list customisation section.
o Date format: allows specifying the format used for displaying dates
inside the result list. This should be specified as an strftime()
string (man strftime).
o Abstract snippet separator: for synthetic abstracts built from index
data, which are usually made of several snippets from different parts
of the document, this defines the snippet separator, an ellipsis by
default.
Search parameters:
o Hide duplicate results: decides if result list entries are shown for
identical documents found in different places.
o Stemming language: stemming obviously depends on the document's
language. This listbox will let you chose among the stemming databases
which were built during indexing (this is set in the main
configuration file), or later added with recollindex -s (See the
recollindex manual). Stemming languages which are dynamically added
will be deleted at the next indexing pass unless they are also added
in the configuration file.
o Automatically add phrase to simple searches: a phrase will be
automatically built and added to simple searches when looking for Any
terms. This will give a relevance boost to the results where the
search terms appear as a phrase (consecutive and in order).
o Autophrase term frequency threshold percentage: very frequent terms
should not be included in automatic phrase searches for performance
reasons. The parameter defines the cutoff percentage (percentage of
the documents where the term appears).
o Replace abstracts from documents: this decides if we should synthesize
and display an abstract in place of an explicit abstract found within
the document itself.
o Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build
document abstracts (lists of snippets) when displaying the result
list. Abstracts are constructed by taking context from the document
information, around the search terms.
o Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste...
o Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed
around each term occurrence.
o Query language magic file name suffixes: a list of words which
automatically get turned into ext:xxx file name suffix clauses when
starting a query language query (ie: doc xls xlsx...). This will save
some typing for people who use file types a lot when querying.
External indexes: This panel will let you browse for additional indexes
that you may want to search. External indexes are designated by their
database directory (ie: /home/someothergui/.recoll/xapiandb,
/usr/local/recollglobal/xapiandb).
Once entered, the indexes will appear in the External indexes list, and
you can chose which ones you want to use at any moment by checking or
unchecking their entries.
Your main database (the one the current configuration indexes to), is
always implicitly active. If this is not desirable, you can set up your
configuration so that it indexes, for example, an empty directory. An
alternative indexer may also need to implement a way of purging the index
from stale data,
3.1.15.1. The result list format
Newer versions of Recoll (from 1.17) normally use WebKit HTML widgets for
the result list and the snippets window (this may be disabled at build
time). Total customisation is possible with full support for CSS and
Javascript. Conversely, there are limits to what you can do with the older
Qt QTextBrowser, but still, it is possible to decide what data each result
will contain, and how it will be displayed.
The result list presentation can be exhaustively customized by adjusting
two elements:
o The paragraph format
o HTML code inside the header section. For versions 1.21 and later, this
is also used for the snippets window
The paragraph format and the header fragment can be edited from the Result
list tab of the GUI configuration.
The header fragment is used both for the result list and the snippets
window. The snippets list is a table and has a snippets class attribute.
Each paragraph in the result list is a table, with class respar, but this
can be changed by editing the paragraph format.
There are a few examples on the page about customising the result list on
the Recoll web site.
The paragraph format
This is an arbitrary HTML string where the following printf-like %
substitutions will be performed:
o %A. Abstract
o %D. Date
o %I. Icon image name. This is normally determined from the MIME type.
The associations are defined inside the mimeconf configuration file.
If a thumbnail for the file is found at the standard Freedesktop
location, this will be displayed instead.
o %K. Keywords (if any)
o %L. Precooked Preview, Edit, and possibly Snippets links
o %M. MIME type
o %N. result Number inside the result page
o %P. Parent folder Url. In the case of an embedded document, this is
the parent folder for the top level container file.
o %R. Relevance percentage
o %S. Size information
o %T. Title or Filename if not set.
o %t. Title or Filename if not set.
o %U. Url
The format of the Preview, Edit, and Snippets links is <a href="P%N">, <a
href="E%N"> and <a href="A%N"> where docnum (%N) expands to the document
number inside the result page).
A link target defined as "F%N" will open the document corresponding to the
%P parent folder expansion, usually creating a file manager window on the
folder where the container file resides. E.g.:
<a href="F%N">%P</a>
A link target defined as R%N|scriptname will run the corresponding script
on the result file (if the document is embedded, the script will be
started on the top-level parent). See the section about defining scripts.
In addition to the predefined values above, all strings like %(fieldname)
will be replaced by the value of the field named fieldname for this
document. Only stored fields can be accessed in this way, the value of
indexed but not stored fields is not known at this point in the search
process (see field configuration). There are currently very few fields
stored by default, apart from the values above (only author and filename),
so this feature will need some custom local configuration to be useful. An
example candidate would be the recipient field which is generated by the
message input handlers.
The default value for the paragraph format string is:
"<table class=\"respar\">\n"
"<tr>\n"
"<td><a href='%U'><img src='%I' width='64'></a></td>\n"
"<td>%L &nbsp;<i>%S</i> &nbsp;&nbsp;<b>%T</b><br>\n"
"<span style='white-space:nowrap'><i>%M</i>&nbsp;%D</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>%U</i>&nbsp;%i<br>\n"
"%A %K</td>\n"
"</tr></table>\n"
You may, for example, try the following for a more web-like experience:
<u><b><a href="P%N">%T</a></b></u><br>
%A<font color=#008000>%U - %S</font> - %L
Note that the P%N link in the above paragraph makes the title a preview
link. Or the clean looking:
<img src="%I" align="left">%L <font color="#900000">%R</font>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>%T&</b><br>%S&nbsp;
<font color="#808080"><i>%U</i></font>
<table bgcolor="#e0e0e0">
<tr><td><div>%A</div></td></tr>
</table>%K
These samples, and some others are on the web site, with pictures to show
how they look.
It is also possible to define the value of the snippet separator inside
the abstract section.
3.2. Searching with the KDE KIO slave
3.2.1. What's this
The Recoll KIO slave allows performing a Recoll search by entering an
appropriate URL in a KDE open dialog, or with an HTML-based interface
displayed in Konqueror.
The HTML-based interface is similar to the Qt-based interface, but
slightly less powerful for now. Its advantage is that you can perform your
search while staying fully within the KDE framework: drag and drop from
the result list works normally and you have your normal choice of
applications for opening files.
The alternative interface uses a directory view of search results. Due to
limitations in the current KIO slave interface, it is currently not
obviously useful (to me).
The interface is described in more detail inside a help file which you can
access by entering recoll:/ inside the konqueror URL line (this works only
if the recoll KIO slave has been previously installed).
The instructions for building this module are located in the source tree.
See: kde/kio/recoll/00README.txt. Some Linux distributions do package the
kio-recoll module, so check before diving into the build process, maybe
it's already out there ready for one-click installation.
3.2.2. Searchable documents
As a sample application, the Recoll KIO slave could allow preparing a set
of HTML documents (for example a manual) so that they become their own
search interface inside konqueror.
This can be done by either explicitly inserting <a href="recoll://...">
links around some document areas, or automatically by adding a very small
javascript program to the documents, like the following example, which
would initiate a search by double-clicking any term:
<script language="JavaScript">
function recollsearch() {
var t = document.getSelection();
window.location.href = 'recoll://search/query?qtp=a&p=0&q=' +
encodeURIComponent(t);
}
</script>
....
<body ondblclick="recollsearch()">
3.3. Searching on the command line
There are several ways to obtain search results as a text stream, without
a graphical interface:
o By passing option -t to the recoll program.
o By using the recollq program.
o By writing a custom Python program, using the Recoll Python API.
The first two methods work in the same way and accept/need the same
arguments (except for the additional -t to recoll). The query to be
executed is specified as command line arguments.
recollq is not built by default. You can use the Makefile in the query
directory to build it. This is a very simple program, and if you can
program a little c++, you may find it useful to taylor its output format
to your needs.
recollq has a man page (not installed by default, look in the doc/man
directory). The Usage string is as follows:
recollq: usage:
-P: Show the date span for all the documents present in the index
[-o|-a|-f] [-q] <query string>
Runs a recoll query and displays result lines.
Default: will interpret the argument(s) as a xesam query string
query may be like:
implicit AND, Exclusion, field spec: t1 -t2 title:t3
OR has priority: t1 OR t2 t3 OR t4 means (t1 OR t2) AND (t3 OR t4)
Phrase: "t1 t2" (needs additional quoting on cmd line)
-o Emulate the GUI simple search in ANY TERM mode
-a Emulate the GUI simple search in ALL TERMS mode
-f Emulate the GUI simple search in filename mode
-q is just ignored (compatibility with the recoll GUI command line)
Common options:
-c <configdir> : specify config directory, overriding $RECOLL_CONFDIR
-d also dump file contents
-n [first-]<cnt> define the result slice. The default value for [first]
is 0. Without the option, the default max count is 2000.
Use n=0 for no limit
-b : basic. Just output urls, no mime types or titles
-Q : no result lines, just the processed query and result count
-m : dump the whole document meta[] array for each result
-A : output the document abstracts
-S fld : sort by field <fld>
-s stemlang : set stemming language to use (must exist in index...)
Use -s "" to turn off stem expansion
-D : sort descending
-i <dbdir> : additional index, several can be given
-e use url encoding (%xx) for urls
-F <field name list> : output exactly these fields for each result.
The field values are encoded in base64, output in one line and
separated by one space character. This is the recommended format
for use by other programs. Use a normal query with option -m to
see the field names.
Sample execution:
recollq 'ilur -nautique mime:text/html'
Recoll query: ((((ilur:(wqf=11) OR ilurs) AND_NOT (nautique:(wqf=11)
OR nautiques OR nautiqu OR nautiquement)) FILTER Ttext/html))
4 results
text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/bateaux/ilur/comptes.html] [comptes.html] 18593 bytes
text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/nautique/webnautique/articles/ilur1/index.html] [Constructio...
text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/pagepers/index.html] [psxtcl/writemime/recoll]...
text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/bateaux/ilur/factEtCie/recu-chasse-maree....
3.4. Path translations
In some cases, the document paths stored inside the index do not match the
actual ones, so that document previews and accesses will fail. This can
occur in a number of circumstances:
o When using multiple indexes it is a relatively common occurrence that
some will actually reside on a remote volume, for exemple mounted via
NFS. In this case, the paths used to access the documents on the local
machine are not necessarily the same than the ones used while indexing
on the remote machine. For example, /home/me may have been used as a
topdirs elements while indexing, but the directory might be mounted as
/net/server/home/me on the local machine.
o The case may also occur with removable disks. It is perfectly possible
to configure an index to live with the documents on the removable
disk, but it may happen that the disk is not mounted at the same place
so that the documents paths from the index are invalid.
o As a last exemple, one could imagine that a big directory has been
moved, but that it is currently inconvenient to run the indexer.
More generally, the path translation facility may be useful whenever the
documents paths seen by the indexer are not the same as the ones which
should be used at query time.
Recoll has a facility for rewriting access paths when extracting the data
from the index. The translations can be defined for the main index and for
any additional query index.
In the above NFS example, Recoll could be instructed to rewrite any
file:///home/me URL from the index to file:///net/server/home/me, allowing
accesses from the client.
The translations are defined in the ptrans configuration file, which can
be edited by hand or from the GUI external indexes configuration dialog.
3.5. The query language
The query language processor is activated in the GUI simple search entry
when the search mode selector is set to Query Language. It can also be
used with the KIO slave or the command line search. It broadly has the
same capabilities as the complex search interface in the GUI.
The language is based on the (seemingly defunct) Xesam user search
language specification.
If the results of a query language search puzzle you and you doubt what
has been actually searched for, you can use the GUI Show Query link at the
top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed
by Xapian.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in
the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type,
ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles
or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of
the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value,
separated by a colon (the field separator is the last colon in the
element). Examples: Eugenie, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
dc:title:"eugenie grandet"
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations,
which are mostly unsupported for now (except in special cases, described
further down).
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit
AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in
Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has
priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND
(word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Explicit parenthesis are
not supported.
As of Recoll 1.21, you can use parentheses to group elements, which will
sometimes make things clearer, and may allow expressing combinations which
would have been difficult otherwise.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is
significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as
title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded.
Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on
the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect
one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size). Also see
More about wildcards.
To save you some typing, recent Recoll versions (1.20 and later) interpret
a comma-separated list of terms as an AND list inside the field. Use slash
characters ('/') for an OR list. No white space is allowed. So
author:john,lennon
will search for documents with john and lennon inside the author field (in
any order), and
author:john/ringo
would search for john or ringo.
Modifiers can be set on a double-quote value, for example to specify a
proximity search (unordered). See the modifier section. No space must
separate the final double-quote and the modifiers value, e.g. "two
one"po10
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
o title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be
searched for in the document title or subject.
o author or from for searching the documents originators.
o recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
o keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents
actually have any).
o filename for the document's file name. This is not necessarily set for
all documents: internal documents contained inside a compound one (for
example an EPUB section) do not inherit the container file name any
more, this was replaced by an explicit field (see next). Sub-documents
can still have a specific filename, if it is implied by the document
format, for example the attachment file name for an email attachment.
o containerfilename. This is set for all documents, both top-level and
contained sub-documents, and is always the name of the filesystem
directory entry which contains the data. The terms from this field can
only be matched by an explicit field specification (as opposed to
terms from filename which are also indexed as general document
content). This avoids getting matches for all the sub-documents when
searching for the container file name.
o ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
Recoll 1.20 and later have a way to specify aliases for the field names,
which will save typing, for example by aliasing filename to fn or
containerfilename to cfn. See the section about the fields file
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
o dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex:
dir:/home/me/somedir). -dir also works to find results not in the
specified directory (release >= 1.15.8). Tilde expansion will be
performed as usual (except for a bug in versions 1.19 to 1.19.11p1).
Wildcards will be expanded, but please have a look at an important
limitation of wildcards in path filters.
Relative paths also make sense, for example, dir:share/doc would match
either /usr/share/doc or /usr/local/share/doc
Several dir clauses can be specified, both positive and negative. For
example the following makes sense:
dir:recoll dir:src -dir:utils -dir:common
This would select results which have both recoll and src in the path
(in any order), and which have not either utils or common.
You can also use OR conjunctions with dir: clauses.
A special aspect of dir clauses is that the values in the index are
not transcoded to UTF-8, and never lower-cased or unaccented, but
stored as binary. This means that you need to enter the values in the
exact lower or upper case, and that searches for names with diacritics
may sometimes be impossible because of character set conversion
issues. Non-ASCII UNIX file paths are an unending source of trouble
and are best avoided.
You need to use double-quotes around the path value if it contains
space characters.
o size for filtering the results on file size. Example: size<10000. You
can use <, > or = as operators. You can specify a range like the
following: size>100 size<1000. The usual k/K, m/M, g/G, t/T can be
used as (decimal) multipliers. Ex: size>1k to search for files bigger
than 1000 bytes.
o date for searching or filtering on dates. The syntax for the argument
is based on the ISO8601 standard for dates and time intervals. Only
dates are supported, no times. The general syntax is 2 elements
separated by a / character. Each element can be a date or a period of
time. Periods are specified as PnYnMnD. The n numbers are the
respective numbers of years, months or days, any of which may be
missing. Dates are specified as YYYY-MM-DD. The days and months parts
may be missing. If the / is present but an element is missing, the
missing element is interpreted as the lowest or highest date in the
index. Examples:
o 2001-03-01/2002-05-01 the basic syntax for an interval of dates.
o 2001-03-01/P1Y2M the same specified with a period.
o 2001/ from the beginning of 2001 to the latest date in the index.
o 2001 the whole year of 2001
o P2D/ means 2 days ago up to now if there are no documents with
dates in the future.
o /2003 all documents from 2003 or older.
Periods can also be specified with small letters (ie: p2y).
o mime or format for specifying the MIME type. This one is quite special
because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal
default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html.
Specifying an explicit boolean operator before a mime specification is
not supported and will produce strange results. You can filter out
certain types by using negation (-mime:some/type), and you can use
wildcards in the value (mime:text/*). Note that mime is the ONLY field
with an OR default. You do need to use OR with ext terms for example.
o type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in
text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of MIME types in
categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can
be modified or extended. The default category names are those which
permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed
like MIME types above. This can't be negated with - either.
The document input handlers used while indexing have the possibility to
create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in
the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be
different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
3.5.1. Modifiers
Some characters are recognized as search modifiers when found immediately
after the closing double quote of a phrase, as in "some
term"modifierchars. The actual "phrase" can be a single term of course.
Supported modifiers:
o l can be used to turn off stemming (mostly makes sense with p because
stemming is off by default for phrases).
o o can be used to specify a "slack" for phrase and proximity searches:
the number of additional terms that may be found between the specified
ones. If o is followed by an integer number, this is the slack, else
the default is 10.
o p can be used to turn the default phrase search into a proximity one
(unordered). Example:"order any in"p
o C will turn on case sensitivity (if the index supports it).
o D will turn on diacritics sensitivity (if the index supports it).
o A weight can be specified for a query element by specifying a decimal
value at the start of the modifiers. Example: "Important"2.5.
3.6. Search case and diacritics sensitivity
For Recoll versions 1.18 and later, and when working with a raw index (not
the default), searches can be made sensitive to character case and
diacritics. How this happens is controlled by configuration variables and
what search data is entered.
The general default is that searches are insensitive to case and
diacritics. An entry of resume will match any of Resume, RESUME, resume,
Resume etc.
Two configuration variables can automate switching on sensitivity:
autodiacsens
If this is set, search sensitivity to diacritics will be turned on
as soon as an accented character exists in a search term. When the
variable is set to true, resume will start a
diacritics-unsensitive search, but resume will be matched exactly.
The default value is false.
autocasesens
If this is set, search sensitivity to character case will be
turned on as soon as an upper-case character exists in a search
term except for the first one. When the variable is set to true,
us or Us will start a diacritics-unsensitive search, but US will
be matched exactly. The default value is true (contrary to
autodiacsens).
As in the past, capitalizing the first letter of a word will turn off its
stem expansion and have no effect on case-sensitivity.
You can also explicitely activate case and diacritics sensitivity by using
modifiers with the query language. C will make the term case-sensitive,
and D will make it diacritics-sensitive. Examples:
"us"C
will search for the term us exactly (Us will not be a match).
"resume"D
will search for the term resume exactly (resume will not be a match).
When either case or diacritics sensitivity is activated, stem expansion is
turned off. Having both does not make much sense.
3.7. Anchored searches and wildcards
Some special characters are interpreted by Recoll in search strings to
expand or specialize the search. Wildcards expand a root term in
controlled ways. Anchor characters can restrict a search to succeed only
if the match is found at or near the beginning of the document or one of
its fields.
3.7.1. More about wildcards
All words entered in Recoll search fields will be processed for wildcard
expansion before the request is finally executed.
The wildcard characters are:
o * which matches 0 or more characters.
o ? which matches a single character.
o [] which allow defining sets of characters to be matched (ex: [abc]
matches a single character which may be 'a' or 'b' or 'c', [0-9]
matches any number.
You should be aware of a few things when using wildcards.
o Using a wildcard character at the beginning of a word can make for a
slow search because Recoll will have to scan the whole index term list
to find the matches. However, this is much less a problem for field
searches, and queries like author:*@domain.com can sometimes be very
useful.
o For Recoll version 18 only, when working with a raw index (preserving
character case and diacritics), the literal part of a wildcard
expression will be matched exactly for case and diacritics. This is
not true any more for versions 19 and later.
o Using a * at the end of a word can produce more matches than you would
think, and strange search results. You can use the term explorer tool
to check what completions exist for a given term. You can also see
exactly what search was performed by clicking on the link at the top
of the result list. In general, for natural language terms, stem
expansion will produce better results than an ending * (stem expansion
is turned off when any wildcard character appears in the term).
3.7.1.1. Wildcards and path filtering
Due to the way that Recoll processes wildcards inside dir path filtering
clauses, they will have a multiplicative effect on the query size. A
clause containg wildcards in several paths elements, like, for example,
dir:/home/me/*/*/docdir, will almost certainly fail if your indexed tree
is of any realistic size.
Depending on the case, you may be able to work around the issue by
specifying the paths elements more narrowly, with a constant prefix, or by
using 2 separate dir: clauses instead of multiple wildcards, as in
dir:/home/me dir:docdir. The latter query is not equivalent to the initial
one because it does not specify a number of directory levels, but that's
the best we can do (and it may be actually more useful in some cases).
3.7.2. Anchored searches
Two characters are used to specify that a search hit should occur at the
beginning or at the end of the text. ^ at the beginning of a term or
phrase constrains the search to happen at the start, $ at the end force it
to happen at the end.
As this function is implemented as a phrase search it is possible to
specify a maximum distance at which the hit should occur, either through
the controls of the advanced search panel, or using the query language,
for example, as in:
"^someterm"o10
which would force someterm to be found within 10 terms of the start of the
text. This can be combined with a field search as in
somefield:"^someterm"o10 or somefield:someterm$.
This feature can also be used with an actual phrase search, but in this
case, the distance applies to the whole phrase and anchor, so that, for
example, bla bla my unexpected term at the beginning of the text would be
a match for "^my term"o5.
Anchored searches can be very useful for searches inside somewhat
structured documents like scientific articles, in case explicit metadata
has not been supplied (a most frequent case), for example for looking for
matches inside the abstract or the list of authors (which occur at the top
of the document).
3.8. Desktop integration
Being independant of the desktop type has its drawbacks: Recoll desktop
integration is minimal. However there are a few tools available:
o The KDE KIO Slave was described in a previous section.
o If you use a recent version of Ubuntu Linux, you may find the Ubuntu
Unity Lens module useful.
o There is also an independantly developed Krunner plugin.
Here follow a few other things that may help.
3.8.1. Hotkeying recoll
It is surprisingly convenient to be able to show or hide the Recoll GUI
with a single keystroke. Recoll comes with a small Python script, based on
the libwnck window manager interface library, which will allow you to do
just this. The detailed instructions are on this wiki page.
3.8.2. The KDE Kicker Recoll applet
This is probably obsolete now. Anyway:
The Recoll source tree contains the source code to the recoll_applet, a
small application derived from the find_applet. This can be used to add a
small Recoll launcher to the KDE panel.
The applet is not automatically built with the main Recoll programs, nor
is it included with the main source distribution (because the KDE build
boilerplate makes it relatively big). You can download its source from the
recoll.org download page. Use the omnipotent configure;make;make install
incantation to build and install.
You can then add the applet to the panel by right-clicking the panel and
choosing the Add applet entry.
The recoll_applet has a small text window where you can type a Recoll
query (in query language form), and an icon which can be used to restrict
the search to certain types of files. It is quite primitive, and launches
a new recoll GUI instance every time (even if it is already running). You
may find it useful anyway.
Chapter 4. Programming interface
Recoll has an Application Programming Interface, usable both for indexing
and searching, currently accessible from the Python language.
Another less radical way to extend the application is to write input
handlers for new types of documents.
The processing of metadata attributes for documents (fields) is highly
configurable.
4.1. Writing a document input handler
Terminology
The small programs or pieces of code which handle the processing of the
different document types for Recoll used to be called filters, which is
still reflected in the name of the directory which holds them and many
configuration variables. They were named this way because one of their
primary functions is to filter out the formatting directives and keep the
text content. However these modules may have other behaviours, and the
term input handler is now progressively substituted in the documentation.
filter is still used in many places though.
Recoll input handlers cooperate to translate from the multitude of input
document formats, simple ones as opendocument, acrobat), or compound ones
such as Zip or Email, into the final Recoll indexing input format, which
is plain text. Most input handlers are executable programs or scripts. A
few handlers are coded in C++ and live inside recollindex. This latter
kind will not be described here.
There are currently (1.18 and since 1.13) two kinds of external executable
input handlers:
o Simple exec handlers run once and exit. They can be bare programs like
antiword, or scripts using other programs. They are very simple to
write, because they just need to print the converted document to the
standard output. Their output can be plain text or HTML. HTML is
usually preferred because it can store metadata fields and it allows
preserving some of the formatting for the GUI preview.
o Multiple execm handlers can process multiple files (sparing the
process startup time which can be very significant), or multiple
documents per file (e.g.: for zip or chm files). They communicate with
the indexer through a simple protocol, but are nevertheless a bit more
complicated than the older kind. Most of new handlers are written in
Python, using a common module to handle the protocol. There is an
exception, rclimg which is written in Perl. The subdocuments output by
these handlers can be directly indexable (text or HTML), or they can
be other simple or compound documents that will need to be processed
by another handler.
In both cases, handlers deal with regular file system files, and can
process either a single document, or a linear list of documents in each
file. Recoll is responsible for performing up to date checks, deal with
more complex embedding and other upper level issues.
A simple handler returning a document in text/plain format, can transfer
no metadata to the indexer. Generic metadata, like document size or
modification date, will be gathered and stored by the indexer.
Handlers that produce text/html format can return an arbitrary amount of
metadata inside HTML meta tags. These will be processed according to the
directives found in the fields configuration file.
The handlers that can handle multiple documents per file return a single
piece of data to identify each document inside the file. This piece of
data, called an ipath element will be sent back by Recoll to extract the
document at query time, for previewing, or for creating a temporary file
to be opened by a viewer.
The following section describes the simple handlers, and the next one
gives a few explanations about the execm ones. You could conceivably write
a simple handler with only the elements in the manual. This will not be
the case for the other ones, for which you will have to look at the code.
4.1.1. Simple input handlers
Recoll simple handlers are usually shell-scripts, but this is in no way
necessary. Extracting the text from the native format is the difficult
part. Outputting the format expected by Recoll is trivial. Happily enough,
most document formats have translators or text extractors which can be
called from the handler. In some cases the output of the translating
program is completely appropriate, and no intermediate shell-script is
needed.
Input handlers are called with a single argument which is the source file
name. They should output the result to stdout.
When writing a handler, you should decide if it will output plain text or
HTML. Plain text is simpler, but you will not be able to add metadata or
vary the output character encoding (this will be defined in a
configuration file). Additionally, some formatting may be easier to
preserve when previewing HTML. Actually the deciding factor is metadata:
Recoll has a way to extract metadata from the HTML header and use it for
field searches..
The RECOLL_FILTER_FORPREVIEW environment variable (values yes, no) tells
the handler if the operation is for indexing or previewing. Some handlers
use this to output a slightly different format, for example stripping
uninteresting repeated keywords (ie: Subject: for email) when indexing.
This is not essential.
You should look at one of the simple handlers, for example rclps for a
starting point.
Don't forget to make your handler executable before testing !
4.1.2. "Multiple" handlers
If you can program and want to write an execm handler, it should not be
too difficult to make sense of one of the existing modules. For example,
look at rclzip which uses Zip file paths as identifiers (ipath), and
rclics, which uses an integer index. Also have a look at the comments
inside the internfile/mh_execm.h file and possibly at the corresponding
module.
execm handlers sometimes need to make a choice for the nature of the ipath
elements that they use in communication with the indexer. Here are a few
guidelines:
o Use ASCII or UTF-8 (if the identifier is an integer print it, for
example, like printf %d would do).
o If at all possible, the data should make some kind of sense when
printed to a log file to help with debugging.
o Recoll uses a colon (:) as a separator to store a complex path
internally (for deeper embedding). Colons inside the ipath elements
output by a handler will be escaped, but would be a bad choice as a
handler-specific separator (mostly, again, for debugging issues).
In any case, the main goal is that it should be easy for the handler to
extract the target document, given the file name and the ipath element.
execm handlers will also produce a document with a null ipath element.
Depending on the type of document, this may have some associated data
(e.g. the body of an email message), or none (typical for an archive
file). If it is empty, this document will be useful anyway for some
operations, as the parent of the actual data documents.
4.1.3. Telling Recoll about the handler
There are two elements that link a file to the handler which should
process it: the association of file to MIME type and the association of a
MIME type with a handler.
The association of files to MIME types is mostly based on name suffixes.
The types are defined inside the mimemap file. Example:
.doc = application/msword
If no suffix association is found for the file name, Recoll will try to
execute the file -i command to determine a MIME type.
The association of file types to handlers is performed in the mimeconf
file. A sample will probably be of better help than a long explanation:
[index]
application/msword = exec antiword -t -i 1 -m UTF-8;\
mimetype = text/plain ; charset=utf-8
application/ogg = exec rclogg
text/rtf = exec unrtf --nopict --html; charset=iso-8859-1; mimetype=text/html
application/x-chm = execm rclchm
The fragment specifies that:
o application/msword files are processed by executing the antiword
program, which outputs text/plain encoded in utf-8.
o application/ogg files are processed by the rclogg script, with default
output type (text/html, with encoding specified in the header, or
utf-8 by default).
o text/rtf is processed by unrtf, which outputs text/html. The
iso-8859-1 encoding is specified because it is not the utf-8 default,
and not output by unrtf in the HTML header section.
o application/x-chm is processed by a persistant handler. This is
determined by the execm keyword.
4.1.4. Input handler HTML output
The output HTML could be very minimal like the following example:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
Some text content
</body>
</html>
You should take care to escape some characters inside the text by
transforming them into appropriate entities. At the very minimum, "&"
should be transformed into "&amp;", "<" should be transformed into "&lt;".
This is not always properly done by translating programs which output
HTML, and of course never by those which output plain text.
When encapsulating plain text in an HTML body, the display of a preview
may be improved by enclosing the text inside <pre> tags.
The character set needs to be specified in the header. It does not need to
be UTF-8 (Recoll will take care of translating it), but it must be
accurate for good results.
Recoll will process meta tags inside the header as possible document
fields candidates. Documents fields can be processed by the indexer in
different ways, for searching or displaying inside query results. This is
described in a following section.
By default, the indexer will process the standard header fields if they
are present: title, meta/description, and meta/keywords are both indexed
and stored for query-time display.
A predefined non-standard meta tag will also be processed by Recoll
without further configuration: if a date tag is present and has the right
format, it will be used as the document date (for display and sorting), in
preference to the file modification date. The date format should be as
follows:
<meta name="date" content="YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS">
or
<meta name="date" content="YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS">
Example:
<meta name="date" content="2013-02-24 17:50:00">
Input handlers also have the possibility to "invent" field names. This
should also be output as meta tags:
<meta name="somefield" content="Some textual data" />
You can embed HTML markup inside the content of custom fields, for
improving the display inside result lists. In this case, add a (wildly
non-standard) markup attribute to tell Recoll that the value is HTML and
should not be escaped for display.
<meta name="somefield" markup="html" content="Some <i>textual</i> data" />
As written above, the processing of fields is described in a further
section.
4.1.5. Page numbers
The indexer will interpret ^L characters in the handler output as
indicating page breaks, and will record them. At query time, this allows
starting a viewer on the right page for a hit or a snippet. Currently,
only the PDF, Postscript and DVI handlers generate page breaks.
4.2. Field data processing
Fields are named pieces of information in or about documents, like title,
author, abstract.
The field values for documents can appear in several ways during indexing:
either output by input handlers as meta fields in the HTML header section,
or extracted from file extended attributes, or added as attributes of the
Doc object when using the API, or again synthetized internally by Recoll.
The Recoll query language allows searching for text in a specific field.
Recoll defines a number of default fields. Additional ones can be output
by handlers, and described in the fields configuration file.
Fields can be:
o indexed, meaning that their terms are separately stored in inverted
lists (with a specific prefix), and that a field-specific search is
possible.
o stored, meaning that their value is recorded in the index data record
for the document, and can be returned and displayed with search
results.
A field can be either or both indexed and stored. This and other aspects
of fields handling is defined inside the fields configuration file.
The sequence of events for field processing is as follows:
o During indexing, recollindex scans all meta fields in HTML documents
(most document types are transformed into HTML at some point). It
compares the name for each element to the configuration defining what
should be done with fields (the fields file)
o If the name for the meta element matches one for a field that should
be indexed, the contents are processed and the terms are entered into
the index with the prefix defined in the fields file.
o If the name for the meta element matches one for a field that should
be stored, the content of the element is stored with the document data
record, from which it can be extracted and displayed at query time.
o At query time, if a field search is performed, the index prefix is
computed and the match is only performed against appropriately
prefixed terms in the index.
o At query time, the field can be displayed inside the result list by
using the appropriate directive in the definition of the result list
paragraph format. All fields are displayed on the fields screen of the
preview window (which you can reach through the right-click menu).
This is independant of the fact that the search which produced the
results used the field or not.
You can find more information in the section about the fields file, or in
comments inside the file.
You can also have a look at the example on the Wiki, detailing how one
could add a page count field to pdf documents for displaying inside result
lists.
4.3. API
4.3.1. Interface elements
A few elements in the interface are specific and and need an explanation.
udi
An udi (unique document identifier) identifies a document. Because
of limitations inside the index engine, it is restricted in length
(to 200 bytes), which is why a regular URI cannot be used. The
structure and contents of the udi is defined by the application
and opaque to the index engine. For example, the internal file
system indexer uses the complete document path (file path +
internal path), truncated to length, the suppressed part being
replaced by a hash value.
ipath
This data value (set as a field in the Doc object) is stored,
along with the URL, but not indexed by Recoll. Its contents are
not interpreted, and its use is up to the application. For
example, the Recoll internal file system indexer stores the part
of the document access path internal to the container file (ipath
in this case is a list of subdocument sequential numbers). url and
ipath are returned in every search result and permit access to the
original document.
Stored and indexed fields
The fields file inside the Recoll configuration defines which
document fields are either "indexed" (searchable), "stored"
(retrievable with search results), or both.
Data for an external indexer, should be stored in a separate index, not
the one for the Recoll internal file system indexer, except if the latter
is not used at all). The reason is that the main document indexer purge
pass would remove all the other indexer's documents, as they were not seen
during indexing. The main indexer documents would also probably be a
problem for the external indexer purge operation.
4.3.2. Python interface
4.3.2.1. Introduction
Recoll versions after 1.11 define a Python programming interface, both for
searching and indexing. The indexing portion has seen little use, but the
searching one is used in the Recoll Ubuntu Unity Lens and Recoll Web UI.
The API is inspired by the Python database API specification. There were
two major changes in recent Recoll versions:
o The basis for the Recoll API changed from Python database API version
1.0 (Recoll versions up to 1.18.1), to version 2.0 (Recoll 1.18.2 and
later).
o The recoll module became a package (with an internal recoll module) as
of Recoll version 1.19, in order to add more functions. For existing
code, this only changes the way the interface must be imported.
We will mostly describe the new API and package structure here. A
paragraph at the end of this section will explain a few differences and
ways to write code compatible with both versions.
The Python interface can be found in the source package, under
python/recoll.
The python/recoll/ directory contains the usual setup.py. After
configuring the main Recoll code, you can use the script to build and
install the Python module:
cd recoll-xxx/python/recoll
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
The normal Recoll installer installs the Python API along with the main
code.
When installing from a repository, and depending on the distribution, the
Python API can sometimes be found in a separate package.
4.3.2.2. Recoll package
The recoll package contains two modules:
o The recoll module contains functions and classes used to query (or
update) the index.
o The rclextract module contains functions and classes used to access
document data.
4.3.2.3. The recoll module
Functions
connect(confdir=None, extra_dbs=None, writable = False)
The connect() function connects to one or several Recoll index(es)
and returns a Db object.
o confdir may specify a configuration directory. The usual
defaults apply.
o extra_dbs is a list of additional indexes (Xapian
directories).
o writable decides if we can index new data through this
connection.
This call initializes the recoll module, and it should always be
performed before any other call or object creation.
Classes
The Db class
A Db object is created by a connect() call and holds a connection to a
Recoll index.
Methods
Db.close()
Closes the connection. You can't do anything with the Db object
after this.
Db.query(), Db.cursor()
These aliases return a blank Query object for this index.
Db.setAbstractParams(maxchars, contextwords)
Set the parameters used to build snippets (sets of keywords in
context text fragments). maxchars defines the maximum total size
of the abstract. contextwords defines how many terms are shown
around the keyword.
Db.termMatch(match_type, expr, field='', maxlen=-1, casesens=False,
diacsens=False, lang='english')
Expand an expression against the index term list. Performs the
basic function from the GUI term explorer tool. match_type can be
either of wildcard, regexp or stem. Returns a list of terms
expanded from the input expression.
The Query class
A Query object (equivalent to a cursor in the Python DB API) is created by
a Db.query() call. It is used to execute index searches.
Methods
Query.sortby(fieldname, ascending=True)
Sort results by fieldname, in ascending or descending order. Must
be called before executing the search.
Query.execute(query_string, stemming=1, stemlang="english")
Starts a search for query_string, a Recoll search language string.
Query.executesd(SearchData)
Starts a search for the query defined by the SearchData object.
Query.fetchmany(size=query.arraysize)
Fetches the next Doc objects in the current search results, and
returns them as an array of the required size, which is by default
the value of the arraysize data member.
Query.fetchone()
Fetches the next Doc object from the current search results.
Query.close()
Closes the query. The object is unusable after the call.
Query.scroll(value, mode='relative')
Adjusts the position in the current result set. mode can be
relative or absolute.
Query.getgroups()
Retrieves the expanded query terms as a list of pairs. Meaningful
only after executexx In each pair, the first entry is a list of
user terms (of size one for simple terms, or more for group and
phrase clauses), the second a list of query terms as derived from
the user terms and used in the Xapian Query.
Query.getxquery()
Return the Xapian query description as a Unicode string.
Meaningful only after executexx.
Query.highlight(text, ishtml = 0, methods = object)
Will insert <span "class=rclmatch">, </span> tags around the match
areas in the input text and return the modified text. ishtml can
be set to indicate that the input text is HTML and that HTML
special characters should not be escaped. methods if set should be
an object with methods startMatch(i) and endMatch() which will be
called for each match and should return a begin and end tag
Query.makedocabstract(doc, methods = object))
Create a snippets abstract for doc (a Doc object) by selecting
text around the match terms. If methods is set, will also perform
highlighting. See the highlight method.
Query.__iter__() and Query.next()
So that things like for doc in query: will work.
Data descriptors
Query.arraysize
Default number of records processed by fetchmany (r/w).
Query.rowcount
Number of records returned by the last execute.
Query.rownumber
Next index to be fetched from results. Normally increments after
each fetchone() call, but can be set/reset before the call to
effect seeking (equivalent to using scroll()). Starts at 0.
The Doc class
A Doc object contains index data for a given document. The data is
extracted from the index when searching, or set by the indexer program
when updating. The Doc object has many attributes to be read or set by its
user. It matches exactly the Rcl::Doc C++ object. Some of the attributes
are predefined, but, especially when indexing, others can be set, the name
of which will be processed as field names by the indexing configuration.
Inputs can be specified as Unicode or strings. Outputs are Unicode
objects. All dates are specified as Unix timestamps, printed as strings.
Please refer to the rcldb/rcldoc.h C++ file for a description of the
predefined attributes.
At query time, only the fields that are defined as stored either by
default or in the fields configuration file will be meaningful in the Doc
object. Especially this will not be the case for the document text. See
the rclextract module for accessing document contents.
Methods
get(key), [] operator
Retrieve the named doc attribute
getbinurl()
Retrieve the URL in byte array format (no transcoding), for use as
parameter to a system call.
items()
Return a dictionary of doc object keys/values
keys()
list of doc object keys (attribute names).
The SearchData class
A SearchData object allows building a query by combining clauses, for
execution by Query.executesd(). It can be used in replacement of the query
language approach. The interface is going to change a little, so no
detailed doc for now...
Methods
addclause(type='and'|'or'|'excl'|'phrase'|'near'|'sub', qstring=string,
slack=0, field='', stemming=1, subSearch=SearchData)
4.3.2.4. The rclextract module
Index queries do not provide document content (only a partial and
unprecise reconstruction is performed to show the snippets text). In order
to access the actual document data, the data extraction part of the
indexing process must be performed (subdocument access and format
translation). This is not trivial in general. The rclextract module
currently provides a single class which can be used to access the data
content for result documents.
Classes
The Extractor class
Methods
Extractor(doc)
An Extractor object is built from a Doc object, output from a
query.
Extractor.textextract(ipath)
Extract document defined by ipath and return a Doc object. The
doc.text field has the document text converted to either
text/plain or text/html according to doc.mimetype. The typical use
would be as follows:
qdoc = query.fetchone()
extractor = recoll.Extractor(qdoc)
doc = extractor.textextract(qdoc.ipath)
# use doc.text, e.g. for previewing
Extractor.idoctofile(ipath, targetmtype, outfile='')
Extracts document into an output file, which can be given
explicitly or will be created as a temporary file to be deleted by
the caller. Typical use:
qdoc = query.fetchone()
extractor = recoll.Extractor(qdoc)
filename = extractor.idoctofile(qdoc.ipath, qdoc.mimetype)
4.3.2.5. Example code
The following sample would query the index with a user language string.
See the python/samples directory inside the Recoll source for other
examples. The recollgui subdirectory has a very embryonic GUI which
demonstrates the highlighting and data extraction functions.
#!/usr/bin/env python
from recoll import recoll
db = recoll.connect()
db.setAbstractParams(maxchars=80, contextwords=4)
query = db.query()
nres = query.execute("some user question")
print "Result count: ", nres
if nres > 5:
nres = 5
for i in range(nres):
doc = query.fetchone()
print "Result #%d" % (query.rownumber,)
for k in ("title", "size"):
print k, ":", getattr(doc, k).encode('utf-8')
abs = db.makeDocAbstract(doc, query).encode('utf-8')
print abs
print
4.3.2.6. Compatibility with the previous version
The following code fragments can be used to ensure that code can run with
both the old and the new API (as long as it does not use the new abilities
of the new API of course).
Adapting to the new package structure:
try:
from recoll import recoll
from recoll import rclextract
hasextract = True
except:
import recoll
hasextract = False
Adapting to the change of nature of the next Query member. The same test
can be used to choose to use the scroll() method (new) or set the next
value (old).
rownum = query.next if type(query.next) == int else \
query.rownumber
Chapter 5. Installation and configuration
5.1. Installing a binary copy
Recoll binary copies are always distributed as regular packages for your
system. They can be obtained either through the system's normal software
distribution framework (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu apt, FreeBSD ports, etc.), or
from some type of "backports" repository providing versions newer than the
standard ones, or found on the Recoll WEB site in some cases.
There used to exist another form of binary install, as pre-compiled source
trees, but these are just less convenient than the packages and don't
exist any more.
The package management tools will usually automatically deal with hard
dependancies for packages obtained from a proper package repository. You
will have to deal with them by hand for downloaded packages (for example,
when dpkg complains about missing dependancies).
In all cases, you will have to check or install supporting applications
for the file types that you want to index beyond those that are natively
processed by Recoll (text, HTML, email files, and a few others).
You should also maybe have a look at the configuration section (but this
may not be necessary for a quick test with default parameters). Most
parameters can be more conveniently set from the GUI interface.
5.2. Supporting packages
Recoll uses external applications to index some file types. You need to
install them for the file types that you wish to have indexed (these are
run-time optional dependencies. None is needed for building or running
Recoll except for indexing their specific file type).
After an indexing pass, the commands that were found missing can be
displayed from the recoll File menu. The list is stored in the missing
text file inside the configuration directory.
A list of common file types which need external commands follows. Many of
the handlers need the iconv command, which is not always listed as a
dependancy.
Please note that, due to the relatively dynamic nature of this
information, the most up to date version is now kept on
http://www.recoll.org/features.html along with links to the home pages or
best source/patches pages, and misc tips. The list below is not updated
often and may be quite stale.
For many Linux distributions, most of the commands listed can be installed
from the package repositories. However, the packages are sometimes
outdated, or not the best version for Recoll, so you should take a look at
http://www.recoll.org/features.html if a file type is important to you.
As of Recoll release 1.14, a number of XML-based formats that were handled
by ad hoc handler code now use the xsltproc command, which usually comes
with libxslt. These are: abiword, fb2 (ebooks), kword, openoffice, svg.
Now for the list:
o Openoffice files need unzip and xsltproc.
o PDF files need pdftotext which is part of Poppler (usually comes with
the poppler-utils package). Avoid the original one from Xpdf.
o Postscript files need pstotext. The original version has an issue with
shell character in file names, which is corrected in recent packages.
See http://www.recoll.org/features.html for more detail.
o MS Word needs antiword. It is also useful to have wvWare installed as
it may be be used as a fallback for some files which antiword does not
handle.
o MS Excel and PowerPoint are processed by internal Python handlers.
o MS Open XML (docx) needs xsltproc.
o Wordperfect files need wpd2html from the libwpd (or libwpd-tools on
Ubuntu) package.
o RTF files need unrtf, which, in its older versions, has much trouble
with non-western character sets. Many Linux distributions carry
outdated unrtf versions. Check http://www.recoll.org/features.html for
details.
o TeX files need untex or detex. Check
http://www.recoll.org/features.html for sources if it's not packaged
for your distribution.
o dvi files need dvips.
o djvu files need djvutxt and djvused from the DjVuLibre package.
o Audio files: Recoll releases 1.14 and later use a single Python
handler based on mutagen for all audio file types.
o Pictures: Recoll uses the Exiftool Perl package to extract tag
information. Most image file formats are supported. Note that there
may not be much interest in indexing the technical tags (image size,
aperture, etc.). This is only of interest if you store personal tags
or textual descriptions inside the image files.
o chm: files in Microsoft help format need Python and the pychm module
(which needs chmlib).
o ICS: up to Recoll 1.13, iCalendar files need Python and the icalendar
module. icalendar is not needed for newer versions, which use internal
code.
o Zip archives need Python (and the standard zipfile module).
o Rar archives need Python, the rarfile Python module and the unrar
utility.
o Midi karaoke files need Python and the Midi module
o Konqueror webarchive format with Python (uses the Tarfile module).
o Mimehtml web archive format (support based on the email handler, which
introduces some mild weirdness, but still usable).
Text, HTML, email folders, and Scribus files are processed internally. Lyx
is used to index Lyx files. Many handlers need iconv and the standard sed
and awk.
5.3. Building from source
5.3.1. Prerequisites
If you can install any or all of the following through the package manager
for your system, all the better. Especially Qt is a very big piece of
software, but you will most probably be able to find a binary package.
You may have to compile Xapian but this is easy.
The shopping list:
o C++ compiler. Up to Recoll version 1.13.04, its absence can manifest
itself by strange messages about a missing iconv_open.
o Development files for Xapian core.
Important
If you are building Xapian for an older CPU (before Pentium 4 or
Athlon 64), you need to add the --disable-sse flag to the configure
command. Else all Xapian application will crash with an illegal
instruction error.
o Development files for Qt 4 . Recoll has not been tested with Qt 5 yet.
Recoll 1.15.9 was the last version to support Qt 3. If you do not want
to install or build the Qt Webkit module, Recoll has a configuration
option to disable its use (see further).
o Development files for X11 and zlib.
o You may also need libiconv. On Linux systems, the iconv interface is
part of libc and you should not need to do anything special.
Check the Recoll download page for up to date version information.
5.3.2. Building
Recoll has been built on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, most
versions after 2005 should be ok, maybe some older ones too (Solaris 8 is
ok). If you build on another system, and need to modify things, I would
very much welcome patches.
Configure options:
o --without-aspell will disable the code for phonetic matching of search
terms.
o --with-fam or --with-inotify will enable the code for real time
indexing. Inotify support is enabled by default on recent Linux
systems.
o --with-qzeitgeist will enable sending Zeitgeist events about the
visited search results, and needs the qzeitgeist package.
o --disable-webkit is available from version 1.17 to implement the
result list with a Qt QTextBrowser instead of a WebKit widget if you
do not or can't depend on the latter.
o --disable-idxthreads is available from version 1.19 to suppress
multithreading inside the indexing process. You can also use the
run-time configuration to restrict recollindex to using a single
thread, but the compile-time option may disable a few more unused
locks. This only applies to the use of multithreading for the core
index processing (data input). The Recoll monitor mode always uses at
least two threads of execution.
o --disable-python-module will avoid building the Python module.
o --disable-xattr will prevent fetching data from file extended
attributes. Beyond a few standard attributes, fetching extended
attributes data can only be useful is some application stores data in
there, and also needs some simple configuration (see comments in the
fields configuration file).
o --enable-camelcase will enable splitting camelCase words. This is not
enabled by default as it has the unfortunate side-effect of making
some phrase searches quite confusing: ie, "MySQL manual" would be
matched by "MySQL manual" and "my sql manual" but not "mysql manual"
(only inside phrase searches).
o --with-file-command Specify the version of the 'file' command to use
(ie: --with-file-command=/usr/local/bin/file). Can be useful to enable
the gnu version on systems where the native one is bad.
o --disable-qtgui Disable the Qt interface. Will allow building the
indexer and the command line search program in absence of a Qt
environment.
o --disable-x11mon Disable X11 connection monitoring inside recollindex.
Together with --disable-qtgui, this allows building recoll without Qt
and X11.
o --disable-pic will compile Recoll with position-dependant code. This
is incompatible with building the KIO or the Python or PHP extensions,
but might yield very marginally faster code.
o Of course the usual autoconf configure options, like --prefix apply.
Normal procedure:
cd recoll-xxx
./configure
make
(practices usual hardship-repelling invocations)
There is little auto-configuration. The configure script will mainly link
one of the system-specific files in the mk directory to mk/sysconf. If
your system is not known yet, it will tell you as much, and you may want
to manually copy and modify one of the existing files (the new file name
should be the output of uname -s).
5.3.2.1. Building on Solaris
We did not test building the GUI on Solaris for recent versions. You will
need at least Qt 4.4. There are some hints on an old web site page, they
may still be valid.
Someone did test the 1.19 indexer and Python module build, they do work,
with a few minor glitches. Be sure to use GNU make and install.
5.3.3. Installation
Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the root of
the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin and the sample
configuration files, scripts and other shared data to prefix/share/recoll.
If the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from either
the system default or the value which was specified when executing
configure (as in configure --prefix /some/path), you will have to set the
RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is
to be found (ie for (ba)sh: export
RECOLL_DATADIR=/some/path/share/recoll).
You can then proceed to configuration.
5.4. Configuration overview
Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the
Preferences menu and stored in the standard Qt place
($HOME/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf). You probably do not want to edit
this by hand.
Recoll indexing options are set inside text configuration files located in
a configuration directory. There can be several such directories, each of
which defines the parameters for one index.
The configuration files can be edited by hand or through the Index
configuration dialog (Preferences menu). The GUI tool will try to respect
your formatting and comments as much as possible, so it is quite possible
to use both ways.
The most accurate documentation for the configuration parameters is given
by comments inside the default files, and we will just give a general
overview here.
By default, for each index, there are two sets of configuration files.
System-wide configuration files are kept in a directory named like
/usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, and define default values, shared by
all indexes. For each index, a parallel set of files defines the
customized parameters.
In addition (as of Recoll version 1.19.7), it is possible to specify two
additional configuration directories which will be stacked before and
after the user configuration directory. These are defined by the
RECOLL_CONFTOP and RECOLL_CONFMID environment variables. Values from
configuration files inside the top directory will override user ones,
values from configuration files inside the middle directory will override
system ones and be overriden by user ones. These two variables may be of
use to applications which augment Recoll functionality, and need to add
configuration data without disturbing the user's files. Please note that
the two, currently single, values will probably be interpreted as
colon-separated lists in the future: do not use colon characters inside
the directory paths.
The default location of the configuration is the .recoll directory in your
home. Most people will only use this directory.
This location can be changed, or others can be added with the
RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to recoll
and recollindex.
If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are
started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files.
recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before
starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately. To avoid
mistakes, the automatic directory creation will only occur for the default
location, not if -c or RECOLL_CONFDIR were used (in the latter cases, you
will have to create the directory).
All configuration files share the same format. For example, a short
extract of the main configuration file might look as follows:
# Space-separated list of directories to index.
topdirs = ~/docs /usr/share/doc
[~/somedirectory-with-utf8-txt-files]
defaultcharset = utf-8
There are three kinds of lines:
o Comment (starts with #) or empty.
o Parameter affectation (name = value).
o Section definition ([somedirname]).
Depending on the type of configuration file, section definitions either
separate groups of parameters or allow redefining some parameters for a
directory sub-tree. They stay in effect until another section definition,
or the end of file, is encountered. Some of the parameters used for
indexing are looked up hierarchically from the current directory location
upwards. Not all parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is
specified for each in the next section.
When found at the beginning of a file path, the tilde character (~) is
expanded to the name of the user's home directory, as a shell would do.
White space is used for separation inside lists. List elements with
embedded spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.
Encoding issues. Most of the configuration parameters are plain ASCII. Two
particular sets of values may cause encoding issues:
o File path parameters may contain non-ascii characters and should use
the exact same byte values as found in the file system directory.
Usually, this means that the configuration file should use the system
default locale encoding.
o The unac_except_trans parameter should be encoded in UTF-8. If your
system locale is not UTF-8, and you need to also specify non-ascii
file paths, this poses a difficulty because common text editors cannot
handle multiple encodings in a single file. In this relatively
unlikely case, you can edit the configuration file as two separate
text files with appropriate encodings, and concatenate them to create
the complete configuration.
5.4.1. Environment variables
RECOLL_CONFDIR
Defines the main configuration directory.
RECOLL_TMPDIR, TMPDIR
Locations for temporary files, in this order of priority. The
default if none of these is set is to use /tmp. Big temporary
files may be created during indexing, mostly for decompressing,
and also for processing, e.g. email attachments.
RECOLL_CONFTOP, RECOLL_CONFMID
Allow adding configuration directories with priorities below and
above the user directory (see above the Configuration overview
section for details).
RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS, RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS
Help for setting up external indexes. See this paragraph for
explanations.
RECOLL_DATADIR
Defines replacement for the default location of Recoll data files,
normally found in, e.g., /usr/share/recoll).
RECOLL_FILTERSDIR
Defines replacement for the default location of Recoll filters,
normally found in, e.g., /usr/share/recoll/filters).
ASPELL_PROG
aspell program to use for creating the spelling dictionary. The
result has to be compatible with the libaspell which Recoll is
using.
VARNAME
Blabla
5.4.2. The main configuration file, recoll.conf
recoll.conf is the main configuration file. It defines things like what to
index (top directories and things to ignore), and the default character
set to use for document types which do not specify it internally.
The default configuration will index your home directory. If this is not
appropriate, start recoll to create a blank configuration, click Cancel,
and edit the configuration file before restarting the command. This will
start the initial indexing, which may take some time.
Most of the following parameters can be changed from the Index
Configuration menu in the recoll interface. Some can only be set by
editing the configuration file.
5.4.2.1. Parameters affecting what documents we index:
topdirs
Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively
for directories). You can use symbolic links as elements of this
list. See the followLinks option about following symbolic links
found under the top elements (not followed by default).
skippedNames
A space-separated list of wilcard patterns for names of files or
directories that should be completely ignored. The list defined in
the default file is:
skippedNames = #* bin CVS Cache cache* caughtspam tmp .thumbnails .svn \
*~ .beagle .git .hg .bzr loop.ps .xsession-errors \
.recoll* xapiandb recollrc recoll.conf
The list can be redefined at any sub-directory in the indexed
area.
The top-level directories are not affected by this list (that is,
a directory in topdirs might match and would still be indexed).
The list in the default configuration does not exclude hidden
directories (names beginning with a dot), which means that it may
index quite a few things that you do not want. On the other hand,
email user agents like thunderbird usually store messages in
hidden directories, and you probably want this indexed. One
possible solution is to have .* in skippedNames, and add things
like ~/.thunderbird or ~/.evolution in topdirs.
Not even the file names are indexed for patterns in this list. See
the noContentSuffixes variable for an alternative approach which
indexes the file names.
noContentSuffixes
This is a list of file name endings (not wildcard expressions, nor
dot-delimited suffixes). Only the names of matching files will be
indexed (no attempt at MIME type identification, no decompression,
no content indexing). This can be redefined for subdirectories,
and edited from the GUI. The default value is:
noContentSuffixes = .md5 .map \
.o .lib .dll .a .sys .exe .com \
.mpp .mpt .vsd \
.img .img.gz .img.bz2 .img.xz .image .image.gz .image.bz2 .image.xz \
.dat .bak .rdf .log.gz .log .db .msf .pid \
,v ~ #
skippedPaths and daemSkippedPaths
A space-separated list of patterns for paths of files or
directories that should be skipped. There is no default in the
sample configuration file, but the code always adds the
configuration and database directories in there.
skippedPaths is used both by batch and real time indexing.
daemSkippedPaths can be used to specify things that should be
indexed at startup, but not monitored.
Example of use for skipping text files only in a specific
directory:
skippedPaths = ~/somedir/*.txt
skippedPathsFnmPathname
The values in the *skippedPaths variables are matched by default
with fnmatch(3), with the FNM_PATHNAME flag. This means that '/'
characters must be matched explicitely. You can set
skippedPathsFnmPathname to 0 to disable the use of FNM_PATHNAME
(meaning that /*/dir3 will match /dir1/dir2/dir3).
zipSkippedNames
A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or
directories that should be ignored inside zip archives. This is
used directly by the zip handler, and has a function similar to
skippedNames, but works independantly. Can be redefined for
filesystem subdirectories. For versions up to 1.19, you will need
to update the Zip handler and install a supplementary Python
module. The details are described on the Recoll wiki.
followLinks
Specifies if the indexer should follow symbolic links while
walking the file tree. The default is to ignore symbolic links to
avoid multiple indexing of linked files. No effort is made to
avoid duplication when this option is set to true. This option can
be set individually for each of the topdirs members by using
sections. It can not be changed below the topdirs level.
indexedmimetypes
Recoll normally indexes any file which it knows how to read. This
list lets you restrict the indexed MIME types to what you specify.
If the variable is unspecified or the list empty (the default),
all supported types are processed. Can be redefined for
subdirectories.
excludedmimetypes
This list lets you exclude some MIME types from indexing. Can be
redefined for subdirectories.
compressedfilemaxkbs
Size limit for compressed (.gz or .bz2) files. These need to be
decompressed in a temporary directory for identification, which
can be very wasteful if 'uninteresting' big compressed files are
present. Negative means no limit, 0 means no processing of any
compressed file. Defaults to -1.
textfilemaxmbs
Maximum size for text files. Very big text files are often
uninteresting logs. Set to -1 to disable (default 20MB).
textfilepagekbs
If set to other than -1, text files will be indexed as multiple
documents of the given page size. This may be useful if you do
want to index very big text files as it will both reduce memory
usage at index time and help with loading data to the preview
window. A size of a few megabytes would seem reasonable (default:
1MB).
membermaxkbs
This defines the maximum size in kilobytes for an archive member
(zip, tar or rar at the moment). Bigger entries will be skipped.
indexallfilenames
Recoll indexes file names in a special section of the database to
allow specific file names searches using wild cards. This
parameter decides if file name indexing is performed only for
files with MIME types that would qualify them for full text
indexing, or for all files inside the selected subtrees,
independently of MIME type.
usesystemfilecommand
Decide if we execute a system command (file -i by default) as a
final step for determining the MIME type for a file (the main
procedure uses suffix associations as defined in the mimemap
file). This can be useful for files with suffix-less names, but it
will also cause the indexing of many bogus "text" files.
systemfilecommand
Command to use for mime for mime type determination if
usesystefilecommand is set. Recent versions of xdg-mime sometimes
work better than file.
processwebqueue
If this is set, process the directory where Web browser plugins
copy visited pages for indexing.
webqueuedir
The path to the web indexing queue. This is hard-coded in the
Firefox plugin as ~/.recollweb/ToIndex so there should be no need
to change it.
5.4.2.2. Parameters affecting how we generate terms:
Changing some of these parameters will imply a full reindex. Also, when
using multiple indexes, it may not make sense to search indexes that don't
share the values for these parameters, because they usually affect both
search and index operations.
indexStripChars
Decide if we strip characters of diacritics and convert them to
lower-case before terms are indexed. If we don't, searches
sensitive to case and diacritics can be performed, but the index
will be bigger, and some marginal weirdness may sometimes occur.
The default is a stripped index (indexStripChars = 1) for now.
When using multiple indexes for a search, this parameter must be
defined identically for all. Changing the value implies an index
reset.
maxTermExpand
Maximum expansion count for a single term (e.g.: when using
wildcards). The default of 10000 is reasonable and will avoid
queries that appear frozen while the engine is walking the term
list.
maxXapianClauses
Maximum number of elementary clauses we can add to a single Xapian
query. In some cases, the result of term expansion can be
multiplicative, and we want to avoid using excessive memory. The
default of 100 000 should be both high enough in most cases and
compatible with current typical hardware configurations.
nonumbers
If this set to true, no terms will be generated for numbers. For
example "123", "1.5e6", 192.168.1.4, would not be indexed
("value123" would still be). Numbers are often quite interesting
to search for, and this should probably not be set except for
special situations, ie, scientific documents with huge amounts of
numbers in them. This can only be set for a whole index, not for a
subtree.
nocjk
If this set to true, specific east asian (Chinese Korean Japanese)
characters/word splitting is turned off. This will save a small
amount of cpu if you have no CJK documents. If your document base
does include such text but you are not interested in searching it,
setting nocjk may be a significant time and space saver.
cjkngramlen
This lets you adjust the size of n-grams used for indexing CJK
text. The default value of 2 is probably appropriate in most
cases. A value of 3 would allow more precision and efficiency on
longer words, but the index will be approximately twice as large.
indexstemminglanguages
A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be
built. See recollindex(1) or use the recollindex -l command for
possible values. You can add a stem expansion database for a
different language by using recollindex -s, but it will be deleted
during the next indexing. Only languages listed in the
configuration file are permanent.
defaultcharset
The name of the character set used for files that do not contain a
character set definition (ie: plain text files). This can be
redefined for any sub-directory. If it is not set at all, the
character set used is the one defined by the nls environment (
LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG), or iso8859-1 if nothing is set.
unac_except_trans
This is a list of characters, encoded in UTF-8, which should be
handled specially when converting text to unaccented lowercase.
For example, in Swedish, the letter a with diaeresis has full
alphabet citizenship and should not be turned into an a. Each
element in the space-separated list has the special character as
first element and the translation following. The handling of both
the lowercase and upper-case versions of a character should be
specified, as appartenance to the list will turn-off both standard
accent and case processing. Example for Swedish:
unac_except_trans = aaaa AAaa a:a: A:a: o:o: O:o:
Note that the translation is not limited to a single character,
you could very well have something like u:ue in the list.
The default value set for unac_except_trans can't be listed here
because I have trouble with SGML and UTF-8, but it only contains
ligature decompositions: german ss, oe, ae, fi, fl.
This parameter can't be defined for subdirectories, it is global,
because there is no way to do otherwise when querying. If you have
document sets which would need different values, you will have to
index and query them separately.
maildefcharset
This can be used to define the default character set specifically
for email messages which don't specify it. This is mainly useful
for readpst (libpst) dumps, which are utf-8 but do not say so.
localfields
This allows setting fields for all documents under a given
directory. Typical usage would be to set an "rclaptg" field, to be
used in mimeview to select a specific viewer. If several fields
are to be set, they should be separated with a semi-colon (';')
character, which there is currently no way to escape. Also note
the initial semi-colon. Example: localfields= ;rclaptg=gnus;other
= val, then select specifier viewer with mimetype|tag=... in
mimeview.
testmodifusemtime
If true, use mtime instead of default ctime to determine if a file
has been modified (in addition to size, which is always used).
Setting this can reduce re-indexing on systems where extended
attributes are modified (by some other application), but not
indexed (changing extended attributes only affects ctime). Notes:
o This may prevent detection of change in some marginal file
rename cases (the target would need to have the same size and
mtime).
o You should probably also set noxattrfields to 1 in this case,
except if you still prefer to perform xattr indexing, for
example if the local file update pattern makes it of value
(as in general, there is a risk for pure extended attributes
updates without file modification to go undetected).
Perform a full index reset after changing the value of this
parameter.
noxattrfields
Recoll versions 1.19 and later automatically translate file
extended attributes into document fields (to be processed
according to the parameters from the fields file). Setting this
variable to 1 will disable the behaviour.
metadatacmds
This allows executing external commands for each file and storing
the output in Recoll document fields. This could be used for
example to index external tag data. The value is a list of field
names and commands, don't forget an initial semi-colon. Example:
[/some/area/of/the/fs]
metadatacmds = ; tags = tmsu tags %f; otherfield = somecmd -xx %f
As a specially disgusting hack brought by Recoll 1.19.7, if a
"field name" begins with rclmulti, the data returned by the
command is expected to contain multiple field values, in
configuration file format. This allows setting several fields by
executing a single command. Example:
metadatacmds = ; rclmulti1 = somecmd %f
If somecmd returns data in the form of:
field1 = value1
field2 = value for field2
field1 and field2 will be set inside the document metadata.
5.4.2.3. Parameters affecting where and how we store things:
dbdir
The name of the Xapian data directory. It will be created if
needed when the index is initialized. If this is not an absolute
path, it will be interpreted relative to the configuration
directory. The value can have embedded spaces but starting or
trailing spaces will be trimmed. You cannot use quotes here.
idxstatusfile
The name of the scratch file where the indexer process updates its
status. Default: idxstatus.txt inside the configuration directory.
maxfsoccuppc
Maximum file system occupation before we stop indexing. The value
is a percentage, corresponding to what the "Capacity" df output
column shows. The default value is 0, meaning no checking.
mboxcachedir
The directory where mbox message offsets cache files are held.
This is normally $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mboxcache, but it may be useful
to share a directory between different configurations.
mboxcacheminmbs
The minimum mbox file size over which we cache the offsets. There
is really no sense in caching offsets for small files. The default
is 5 MB.
webcachedir
This is only used by the web browser plugin indexing code, and
defines where the cache for visited pages will live. Default:
$RECOLL_CONFDIR/webcache
webcachemaxmbs
This is only used by the web browser plugin indexing code, and
defines the maximum size for the web page cache. Default: 40 MB.
Quite unfortunately, this is only taken into account when creating
the cache file. You need to delete the file for a change to be
taken into account.
idxflushmb
Threshold (megabytes of new text data) where we flush from memory
to disk index. Setting this can help control memory usage. A value
of 0 means no explicit flushing, letting Xapian use its own
default, which is flushing every 10000 (or XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD)
documents, which gives little memory usage control, as memory
usage also depends on average document size. The default value is
10, and it is probably a bit low. If your system usually has free
memory, you can try higher values between 20 and 80. In my
experience, values beyond 100 are always counterproductive.
5.4.2.4. Parameters affecting multithread processing
The Recoll indexing process recollindex can use multiple threads to speed
up indexing on multiprocessor systems. The work done to index files is
divided in several stages and some of the stages can be executed by
multiple threads. The stages are:
1. File system walking: this is always performed by the main thread.
2. File conversion and data extraction.
3. Text processing (splitting, stemming, etc.)
4. Xapian index update.
You can also read a longer document about the transformation of Recoll
indexing to multithreading.
The threads configuration is controlled by two configuration file
parameters.
thrQSizes
This variable defines the job input queues configuration. There
are three possible queues for stages 2, 3 and 4, and this
parameter should give the queue depth for each stage (three
integer values). If a value of -1 is used for a given stage, no
queue is used, and the thread will go on performing the next
stage. In practise, deep queues have not been shown to increase
performance. A value of 0 for the first queue tells Recoll to
perform autoconfiguration (no need for the two other values in
this case) - this is the default configuration.
thrTCounts
This defines the number of threads used for each stage. If a value
of -1 is used for one of the queue depths, the corresponding
thread count is ignored. It makes no sense to use a value other
than 1 for the last stage because updating the Xapian index is
necessarily single-threaded (and protected by a mutex).
The following example would use three queues (of depth 2), and 4 threads
for converting source documents, 2 for processing their text, and one to
update the index. This was tested to be the best configuration on the test
system (quadri-processor with multiple disks).
thrQSizes = 2 2 2
thrTCounts = 4 2 1
The following example would use a single queue, and the complete
processing for each document would be performed by a single thread
(several documents will still be processed in parallel in most cases). The
threads will use mutual exclusion when entering the index update stage. In
practise the performance would be close to the precedent case in general,
but worse in certain cases (e.g. a Zip archive would be performed purely
sequentially), so the previous approach is preferred. YMMV... The 2 last
values for thrTCounts are ignored.
thrQSizes = 2 -1 -1
thrTCounts = 6 1 1
The following example would disable multithreading. Indexing will be
performed by a single thread.
thrQSizes = -1 -1 -1
5.4.2.5. Miscellaneous parameters:
autodiacsens
IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger
diacritics sensitivity if the search term has accented characters
(not in unac_except_trans). Else you need to use the query
language and the D modifier to specify diacritics sensitivity.
Default is no.
autocasesens
IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger
character case sensitivity if the search term has upper-case
characters in any but the first position. Else you need to use the
query language and the C modifier to specify character-case
sensitivity. Default is yes.
loglevel,daemloglevel
Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists
quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors.
The daemversion is specific to the indexing monitor daemon.
logfilename, daemlogfilename
Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special
value, and is the default. The daemversion is specific to the
indexing monitor daemon.
checkneedretryindexscript
This defines the name for a command executed by recollindex when
starting indexing. If the exit status of the command is 0,
recollindex retries to index all files which previously could not
be indexed because of data extraction errors. The default value is
a script which checks if any of the common bin directories have
changed (indicating that a helper program may have been
installed).
mondelaypatterns
This allows specify wildcard path patterns (processed with
fnmatch(3) with 0 flag), to match files which change too often and
for which a delay should be observed before re-indexing. This is a
space-separated list, each entry being a pattern and a time in
seconds, separated by a colon. You can use double quotes if a path
entry contains white space. Example:
mondelaypatterns = *.log:20 "this one has spaces*:10"
monixinterval
Minimum interval (seconds) for processing the indexing queue. The
real time monitor does not process each event when it comes in,
but will wait this time for the queue to accumulate to diminish
overhead and in order to aggregate multiple events to the same
file. Default 30 S.
monauxinterval
Period (in seconds) at which the real time monitor will regenerate
the auxiliary databases (spelling, stemming) if needed. The
default is one hour.
monioniceclass, monioniceclassdata
These allow defining the ionice class and data used by the indexer
(default class 3, no data).
filtermaxseconds
Maximum handler execution time, after which it is aborted. Some
postscript programs just loop...
filtersdir
A directory to search for the external input handler scripts used
to index some types of files. The value should not be changed,
except if you want to modify one of the default scripts. The value
can be redefined for any sub-directory.
iconsdir
The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are
stored. You can change this if you want different images.
idxabsmlen
Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the
database. The text can come from an actual 'abstract' section in
the document or will just be the beginning of the document. It is
stored in the index so that it can be displayed inside the result
lists without decoding the original file. The idxabsmlen parameter
defines the size of the stored abstract. The default value is 250
bytes. The search interface gives you the choice to display this
stored text or a synthetic abstract built by extracting text
around the search terms. If you always prefer the synthetic
abstract, you can reduce this value and save a little space.
idxmetastoredlen
Maximum stored length for metadata fields. This does not affect
indexing (the whole field is processed anyway), just the amount of
data stored in the index for the purpose of displaying fields
inside result lists or previews. The default value is 150 bytes
which may be too low if you have custom fields.
aspellLanguage
Language definitions to use when creating the aspell dictionary.
The value must match a set of aspell language definition files.
You can type "aspell config" to see where these are installed
(look for data-dir). The default if the variable is not set is to
use your desktop national language environment to guess the value.
noaspell
If this is set, the aspell dictionary generation is turned off.
Useful for cases where you don't need the functionality or when it
is unusable because aspell crashes during dictionary generation.
mhmboxquirks
This allows definining location-related quirks for the mailbox
handler. Currently only the tbird flag is defined, and it should
be set for directories which hold Thunderbird data, as their
folder format is weird.
5.4.3. The fields file
This file contains information about dynamic fields handling in Recoll.
Some very basic fields have hard-wired behaviour, and, mostly, you should
not change the original data inside the fields file. But you can create
custom fields fitting your data and handle them just like they were native
ones.
The fields file has several sections, which each define an aspect of
fields processing. Quite often, you'll have to modify several sections to
obtain the desired behaviour.
We will only give a short description here, you should refer to the
comments inside the default file for more detailed information.
Field names should be lowercase alphabetic ASCII.
[prefixes]
A field becomes indexed (searchable) by having a prefix defined in
this section.
[stored]
A field becomes stored (displayable inside results) by having its
name listed in this section (typically with an empty value).
[aliases]
This section defines lists of synonyms for the canonical names
used inside the [prefixes] and [stored] sections
[queryaliases]
This section also defines aliases for the canonic field names,
with the difference that the substitution will only be used at
query time, avoiding any possibility that the value would pick-up
random metadata from documents.
handler-specific sections
Some input handlers may need specific configuration for handling
fields. Only the email message handler currently has such a
section (named [mail]). It allows indexing arbitrary email headers
in addition to the ones indexed by default. Other such sections
may appear in the future.
Here follows a small example of a personal fields file. This would extract
a specific email header and use it as a searchable field, with data
displayable inside result lists. (Side note: as the email handler does no
decoding on the values, only plain ascii headers can be indexed, and only
the first occurrence will be used for headers that occur several times).
[prefixes]
# Index mailmytag contents (with the given prefix)
mailmytag = XMTAG
[stored]
# Store mailmytag inside the document data record (so that it can be
# displayed - as %(mailmytag) - in result lists).
mailmytag =
[queryaliases]
filename = fn
containerfilename = cfn
[mail]
# Extract the X-My-Tag mail header, and use it internally with the
# mailmytag field name
x-my-tag = mailmytag
5.4.3.1. Extended attributes in the fields file
Recoll versions 1.19 and later process user extended file attributes as
documents fields by default.
Attributes are processed as fields of the same name, after removing the
user prefix on Linux.
The [xattrtofields] section of the fields file allows specifying
translations from extended attributes names to Recoll field names. An
empty translation disables use of the corresponding attribute data.
5.4.4. The mimemap file
mimemap specifies the file name extension to MIME type mappings.
For file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the system's
file -i command will be executed to determine the MIME type (this can be
switched off inside the main configuration file).
The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis, which may be useful
in some cases. Example: gaim logs have a .txt extension but should be
handled specially, which is possible because they are usually all located
in one place.
The recoll_noindex mimemap variable has been moved to recoll.conf and
renamed to noContentSuffixes, while keeping the same function, as of
Recoll version 1.21. For older Recoll versions, see the documentation for
noContentSuffixes but use recoll_noindex in mimemap.
5.4.5. The mimeconf file
mimeconf specifies how the different MIME types are handled for indexing,
and which icons are displayed in the recoll result lists.
Changing the parameters in the [index] section is probably not a good idea
except if you are a Recoll developer.
The [icons] section allows you to change the icons which are displayed by
recoll in the result lists (the values are the basenames of the png images
inside the iconsdir directory (specified in recoll.conf).
5.4.6. The mimeview file
mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Open
link in a result list. Ie: HTML is normally displayed using firefox, but
you may prefer Konqueror, your openoffice.org program might be named
oofice instead of openoffice etc.
Changes to this file can be done by direct editing, or through the recoll
GUI preferences dialog.
If Use desktop preferences to choose document editor is checked in the
Recoll GUI preferences, all mimeview entries will be ignored except the
one labelled application/x-all (which is set to use xdg-open by default).
In this case, the xallexcepts top level variable defines a list of MIME
type exceptions which will be processed according to the local entries
instead of being passed to the desktop. This is so that specific Recoll
options such as a page number or a search string can be passed to
applications that support them, such as the evince viewer.
As for the other configuration files, the normal usage is to have a
mimeview inside your own configuration directory, with just the
non-default entries, which will override those from the central
configuration file.
All viewer definition entries must be placed under a [view] section.
The keys in the file are normally MIME types. You can add an application
tag to specialize the choice for an area of the filesystem (using a
localfields specification in mimeconf). The syntax for the key is
mimetype|tag
The nouncompforviewmts entry, (placed at the top level, outside of the
[view] section), holds a list of MIME types that should not be
uncompressed before starting the viewer (if they are found compressed, ie:
mydoc.doc.gz).
The right side of each assignment holds a command to be executed for
opening the file. The following substitutions are performed:
o %D. Document date
o %f. File name. This may be the name of a temporary file if it was
necessary to create one (ie: to extract a subdocument from a
container).
o %i. Internal path, for subdocuments of containers. The format depends
on the container type. If this appears in the command line, Recoll
will not create a temporary file to extract the subdocument, expecting
the called application (possibly a script) to be able to handle it.
o %M. MIME type
o %p. Page index. Only significant for a subset of document types,
currently only PDF, Postscript and DVI files. Can be used to start the
editor at the right page for a match or snippet.
o %s. Search term. The value will only be set for documents with indexed
page numbers (ie: PDF). The value will be one of the matched search
terms. It would allow pre-setting the value in the "Find" entry inside
Evince for example, for easy highlighting of the term.
o %u. Url.
In addition to the predefined values above, all strings like %(fieldname)
will be replaced by the value of the field named fieldname for the
document. This could be used in combination with field customisation to
help with opening the document.
5.4.7. The ptrans file
ptrans specifies query-time path translations. These can be useful in
multiple cases.
The file has a section for any index which needs translations, either the
main one or additional query indexes. The sections are named with the
Xapian index directory names. No slash character should exist at the end
of the paths (all comparisons are textual). An exemple should make things
sufficiently clear
[/home/me/.recoll/xapiandb]
/this/directory/moved = /to/this/place
[/path/to/additional/xapiandb]
/server/volume1/docdir = /net/server/volume1/docdir
/server/volume2/docdir = /net/server/volume2/docdir
5.4.8. Examples of configuration adjustments
5.4.8.1. Adding an external viewer for an non-indexed type
Imagine that you have some kind of file which does not have indexable
content, but for which you would like to have a functional Open link in
the result list (when found by file name). The file names end in .blob and
can be displayed by application blobviewer.
You need two entries in the configuration files for this to work:
o In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimemap (typically ~/.recoll/mimemap), add the
following line:
.blob = application/x-blobapp
Note that the MIME type is made up here, and you could call it
diesel/oil just the same.
o In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimeview under the [view] section, add:
application/x-blobapp = blobviewer %f
We are supposing that blobviewer wants a file name parameter here, you
would use %u if it liked URLs better.
If you just wanted to change the application used by Recoll to display a
MIME type which it already knows, you would just need to edit mimeview.
The entries you add in your personal file override those in the central
configuration, which you do not need to alter. mimeview can also be
modified from the Gui.
5.4.8.2. Adding indexing support for a new file type
Let us now imagine that the above .blob files actually contain indexable
text and that you know how to extract it with a command line program.
Getting Recoll to index the files is easy. You need to perform the above
alteration, and also to add data to the mimeconf file (typically in
~/.recoll/mimeconf):
o Under the [index] section, add the following line (more about the
rclblob indexing script later):
application/x-blobapp = exec rclblob
o Under the [icons] section, you should choose an icon to be displayed
for the files inside the result lists. Icons are normally 64x64 pixels
PNG files which live in /usr/[local/]share/recoll/images.
o Under the [categories] section, you should add the MIME type where it
makes sense (you can also create a category). Categories may be used
for filtering in advanced search.
The rclblob handler should be an executable program or script which exists
inside /usr/[local/]share/recoll/filters. It will be given a file name as
argument and should output the text or html contents on the standard
output.
The filter programming section describes in more detail how to write an
input handler.
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