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Recoll user manual

1. 2 4 Indexing WEB pages you WiSit FF GR I I IG I I I I I I I I I I yg 25 Extended attribltes dat s 2 4 25 gd hae ech ee dus amp Aie de he UDD GOD IE EW GLUD UG 2 0 Importing external tags 2 7 ITA E dm terne MON Dee ee amp en FRON ee F 2 1 Running indexing as seed RF de mm que dus de Mie GLUD mobi ee EU ad 2 7 2 Using cron to automate indexing FFF I I I GG YY 2 9 Realtmedndexih 2 4 4 saute i a E A ee A te GR RER e 2 8 1 Slowing down the reindexing rate for fast changing files Recoll user manual V 3 Searching 10 3 1 Searching with the Qt graphical user interface EEF 10 3 1 1 Simple search es pis 628 ea PRE RR a FOR A Re 10 3 1 2 The default result list siop 2 4 ea a a aa A E a th 11 3 1 2 1 No results the spelling suggestions 12 3 1 2 2 The result list right click menu 12 2 13 Theres lt table cs aoc d byg ARE e Re Ba ale ds a Ce ede es 3 3 14 Displaying thumbnails CG RR I I I GI I I I I I I E E a E EEE E k 13 3 15 The preview window sc soe s a eack e wa ea dU ew AL GW ea FE 13 3 1 5 1 Searching inside the preview 13 3 1 6 Complex advanced search RR I I I I I I I I I I I I 14 3 1 61 Avanced search the find tab 14
2. Chapter 5 Installation and configuration 5 1 Installing a binary copy There are three types of binary Recoll installations Through your system normal software distribution framework ie Debian Ubuntu apt FreeBSD ports etc From a package downloaded from the Recoll web site From a prebuilt tree downloaded from the Recoll web site In all cases the strict software dependancies ie on Xapian or iconv will be automatically satisfied you should not have to worry about them You will only 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 1 1 Installing through a package system If you use a BSD type port system or a prebuilt package DEB RPM manually or through the system software configuration utility just follow the usual procedure for your system 5 1 2 Installing a prebuilt Recoll The unpackaged binary versions on the Recoll web site are just compressed tar files of a build tree where only the useful parts were kept executables and sample configuration The executable binary files are built with a static link to libxapian and libiconv to make installation easier no de
3. recoll has two search modes Simple search the default on the main screen has a single entry field where you can enter multiple words 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 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 ign
4. As of Recoll release 1 14 a number of XML based formats that were handled by ad hoc filter code now use the xsltproc command which usually comes with libxslt These are abiword fb2 ebooks kword openoffice svg Now for the list Openoffice files need unzip and xsltproc PDF files need pdftotext which is part of the Xpdf or Poppler packages Postscript files need pstotext The original version has an issue with shell character in file names which is corrected in recent packages See the the Recoll helper applications page for more detail 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 MS Excel and PowerPoint need catdoc MS Open XML docx needs xsltproc Wordperfect files need wpd2html from the libwpd or libwpd tools on Ubuntu package RTF files need unrtf which in its standard version has much trouble with non western character sets Check the Recoll helper applications page TeX files need untex or detex Check the Recoll helper applications page for sources if it s not packaged for your distribution dvi files need dvips djvu files need djvutxt and djvused from the DjVuLibre package Audio files Recoll releases before 1 13 used the id3info command from the id3lib package to extract mp3 tag information metaflac standard flac tools for flac files and ogginfo vorbis tools for ogg files Releases 1 14 and la
5. 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 Recoll user manual 37 51 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 ise MESS gt Ds nres 5 for i in range nres doc query fetchone print Result d query rownumber hor KC sts ree ESTI rs dica Ie We Greu ee chloe Ik emo eye ta 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 Tey S 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 Recoll user manual 38 51
6. Users uncrypted dockes projets bateaux ilur comptes html e comptes html 105953 bytes text html file Users uncrypted dockes projets nautique webnautique articles ilurl mde x laca Cons eee Eon text html file Users uncrypted dockes projets pagepers index html psxtcl writemime recoll text html file Users uncrypted dockes projets bateaux ilur factEtCie recu chass 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 When using multiple indexes it is a relatively common occurrence that some will actually reside on a remote volume for exemple mounted via NES 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 e 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 As a last exemple one could imagine that a big directory has been moved but that it is currently inconvenient to run the
7. 3 1 6 2 Avancedsearch the filter tab 15 3 1 6 3 Avanced search history GR I I I I I GG ee 15 3 1 7 The term explorer tool 15 3 1 8 Multiple indexes o 20 4 5 Le di 4 5 0 RE ER be su neue pe ete e 16 3 19 Document History s s sr eani e he BEL eae SAW YSU RE EPP DI GE er rex 16 3 1 10 Sorting search results and collapsing duplicates 16 3 1 11 Search tips shortcuts 17 3 1 11 1 Terms and search expansion 17 3 1 11 2 Working with phrases and proximity W 31113 Others ae 2 5 dow pi pd o ee dg a dra PAM be ee ee a 17 3 1 12 Customizing the search interface FFF FFF I Gu 18 3 1 12 1 Th result hist format 255 4606 va sa sua soda a a she se 20 3 1 12 1 1 The paragraph format 20 3 2 Searching with the KDE KIO slave 21 S24 What Sibis ce dra e e Oe dd A AAA ON 21 3 2 2 Searchabl documents ee pa menu truite BS eed ae mamie Route Bede dede 4 21 3 3 Searching on the command lne FF RR I I GI I I I I I I I 22 3 4 PathrtranslatiOnS s 5 ducs a a Ri wn a E us ADD eae GW AF E 23 3 5 The query language 2 4 4 id a a be ed amas da 23 3 21 Modifiers yes paraa OA Ra NN EN SRE Ne DW GR I MN NN Semen 25 3 6 Sea
8. This feature can be enabled in the GUI Index configuration panel or by editing the configuration file set processwebqueue tol 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 Recoll user manual 8 51 2 6 Importing external tags During inde
9. 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 beat les 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 Example Eugenie author balzac dc title 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 An element preceded by a specifies a term that should not appear Pure negative queries are forbidden 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 Modifiers can be set on a phrase clause for example to specify a proximity search unordered See the modif
10. 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 mhmboxguirks This allows definining location related guirks 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 2 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 file for more detailed information Field names should be lowercase alphabetic ASCII prefixes A field becomes i
11. 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 r sum R sum 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 r sum 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 exa
12. 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 Recoll user manual 15 51 3 1 6 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 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 The next section allows filtering the results by file size There are two entries for minimum and maximum
13. 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 name patterns to the skippedNames list which can be done from the GUI Index configuration menu It is also possible to exclude a mime type independantly of the file name by associating it with the rclnull filter This can be done by editing the mimeconf
14. You may have to compile Xapian but this is easy The shopping list C compiler Up to Recoll version 1 13 04 its absence can manifest itself by strange messages about a missing iconv_open Development files for Xapian core Important O 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 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 Development files for X11 and zlib 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 without aspell will disable the code for phonetic matching of search terms with fam or with inotify will enable the code for real time indexing Inotify support is enabled by default on recent Linux systems with qzei
15. 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 GUL 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 Recoll user manual 24 51 author john doe Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged potatoes
16. Default 30 S monauxinterval Period in seconds at which the real time monitor will regenerate the auxiliary databases spelling stem ming 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 filter execution time after which it is aborted Some postscript programs just loop filtersdir A directory to search for the external filter 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 Recoll user manual 48 51
17. 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 subdocu ment access and format translation This is not trivial in general The rclext ract module currently provides a single class which can be used to access the data content for result documents 4 3 2 4 1 Classes 4 3 2 4 1 1 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 as either text plain or text html according to doc mimetype The typical use would be as follows qdoc guery fetchone extractor recoll Extractor qdoc text extractor textextract qdoc ipath 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 guery fetchone extractor recoll Extractor qdoc filename extractor idoctofile qdoc ipath qdoc mimetype 4 3 2 5 Example code
18. 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 g is just ignored compatibility with the recoll GUI command line Common options cont gd gt c i y eon Eic clir ete ny ON Y ena ej EF Olina CONEDIER d also dump file contents n first lt cnt gt 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 9 8 DOS TIC Just Cuit Wels me mue Io ore tlules Q no result lines just the processed query and result count m dump the whole document metal array for each result A output the document abstracts S Ele g Sere oy TELE D sort descending i lt dbdir gt additional index several can be given e use url encoding xx for urls F lt field name list gt 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 Recoll user manual 23 51 for use by other programs Use a normal query with option m to see the field names Sample execution recollg ilur nautique mime text html Recoll query ilur wqf 11 OR ilurs AND NOT nautique wqf 11 OR nautigues OR nautigu OR nautiguement FILTER Ttext html 4 results text html file
19. 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 reason able and will avoid gueries that appear frozen while the engine is walking the term list maxXapianClauses Maximum number of elementary clauses we can add to a single Xapian guery 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 guite 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 tex
20. configuration file In order to define a positive list You need to edit the main configuration file recoll conf and set 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 There is no GUI way to edit the parameter because this option runs contrary to Recoll main goal which is to help you find information independantly of how it may be stored 2 1 4 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 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 use
21. 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 A search application tries 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 not for a specific form or spelling These different forms may include plurals different tenses for a verb or terms derived from the same root or stem example floor floors floored flooring Search applications usually expand queries to all such related terms words that reduce to the same stem and also provide a way to disable this expansion if you are actually searching for a specific form Stemming by itself does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic searches Recoll supports these features through a specific tool the term explorer which will let you explore the set of index terms along different modes 1 3 Recoll overview Recoll uses the Xapian information retrieval library as its storage and retrieval engine Xapian is a very mature package
22. 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 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 Recoll user manual 18 51 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 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
23. 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 mondelaypatterns This allows specify wildcard path patterns processed with fnmatch 3 with O 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 x log 20 this one has spacesx 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 gueue to accumulate to diminish overhead and in order to aggregate multiple events to the same file
24. 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 filter There are two elements that link a file to the filter which should process it the association of file to mime type and the association of a mime type with a filter 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 filters is performed in the mimeconf file A sample will probably be of better help than a long explanation Recoll user manual 31 51 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 application msword files are processed by executing the antiword program which outputs text plain encoded in utf 8 e application ogg files are processed by the rclogg script with default output type text html with encoding s
25. 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 1 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 patterns for names of files or directories that should be completely ignored The list defined in the default file is skippedNames bin CVS Cache cachex caughtspam tmp thumbnails svn x beagle git hg bzr loop ps xsession errors recollx 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 guite 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 skippedNa mes and add thingslike thunderbirdor evolutionintopdirs Not even the file names are indexed for patterns in this list See th
26. 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 met a 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 lt meta name date content YYYY mm dd HH MM SS gt Ou lt meta name date content YYYY mm ddTHH MM SS gt Recoll user manual 32 51 Example lt meta name date content 2013 02 24 17 50 00 gt Filters also have the possibility to invent field names This should also be output as meta tags lt meta name somefield content Some textual data gt 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 lt meta name somefield markup html content Some lt i gt textual lt i gt data gt 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 filter output as indicating page breaks and will record the
27. size Enter decimal numbers You can use suffix multipliers k K m M g G t T for 1E3 1E6 1E9 1E12 respectively 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 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 di rA dirB would match either dir1 dirA dirB myfilel or dir2 dirA dirB someother myfile2 3 1 6 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 7 The term explorer tool Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search ter
28. 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 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 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 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 Use desktop preferences to choose document editor if this i
29. the message to which the document is attached Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file but that you can t actually visualize the folder there will be an error dialog if you try Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case In other cases the Open option makes sense for example to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page The Open Snippets Window entry will only appear for documents which support page breaks typically PDF Postscript DVD 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 Recoll user manual 13 51 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 s
30. 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 w
31. 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 Recoll user manual 44 51 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 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 O 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 fo
32. 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 Preview Open Copy File Name Copy Url Save to File Find similar Preview Parent document Open Parent document Open Snippets Window The Preview and Open entries do the same thing as the corresponding links 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 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 The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of or attached to a higher level document This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing
33. 0 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 reco11 will have created a recol 1 directory containing empty configuration files which you can edit by hand Recoll user manual 6 51 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 posts
34. 1 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 SRECOLL 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 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 usual
35. 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 9 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 10 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
36. Recoll user manual Recoll user manual Recoll user manual Copyright O 2005 2013 Jean Francois Dockes Recoll user manual COLLABORATORS TITLE Recoll user manual ACTION NAME DATE SIGNATURE WRITTEN BY Jean Francois September 28 2013 Dockes REVISION HISTORY NUMBER DATE DESCRIPTION NAME Recoll user manual Contents 1 Introduction LL e AA E RAR Ee Bag De eee Baka ES abs eo 1 2 Fulltext search coria eb go A a eA ee ee Ae ae 153 JRECOMOVERVIEW ae es rc EE A WE ER RS EERE Ee Bale MUR eee eS 6 Y 2 Indexing 2 1 Introduction sos 8 4 8 READ Bae eee EG SG ee ea eee du RU e E tel 2 1 1 Indexing modes 42 4445 Se wae Sede be mans te OG RR RG O R ED dus dite pu RR 2 1 2 Configurations multiple indexes FFF I I GG YY 2 1 3 Documenttypes so eeoa d mepa ee ER RS Be et ee Rd 8 2 14 RecoVery mans Fe By sua e me me dns ete aa NG EIDDO R EDD edit 2 2 Index stordg lt oi 5 L a dans EA da me bb des EGA SEE A A DR M 2 2 1 Xapian index formats d e Re de du ne eue LLL DCCULLY ASPECIS 5c hue de e gts de dun dre di de Ge de a re NN ODD Eee 2 3 Index configuration lt scoa eww eske e Pa hd A a den ER de de di de ae 2 3 1 Multiple imdexes manok ke ee ERS ee a A de de de 2 3 2 Index case and diacritics sensitivity FFF ee 2 3 3 The index configuration GUI
37. TF 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 co11 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 Recoll user manual 16 51 3 1 8 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 par
38. about the execm ones You could conceivably write a simple filter 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 Recoll user manual 30 51 4 1 1 Simple filters Recoll simple filters 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 filter In some cases the output of the translating program is completely appropriate and no intermediate shell script is needed Filters are called with a single argument which is the source file name They should output the result to stdout When writing a filter 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 filter if the operation is for indexing or previewing Some filters use this to output a slightly different format for example stripping uninte
39. about thumbnail generation on the Recoll wiki 3 1 5 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 5 1 Searching inside the previe
40. ameters Number of results in a result page 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 Edit result list paragraph format string allows you to change the presentation of each result list entry See the result list customisation section 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 Date format allows specifying the format used for displaying dates inside the result list This should be specified as an strftime string man strftime 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 Hide duplicate results decides if result list entries are shown for identical documents found in different places 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 nex
41. ameters 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
42. ansion is truncated because of excessive size Also see More about wildcards The document filters 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 guote of a phrase as in some term modifierchars The actual phrase can be a single term of course Supported modifiers e 1 can be used to turn off stemming mostly makes sense with p because stemming is off by default for phrases e ocan 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 e pcan be used to turn the default phrase search into a proximity one unordered Example order any in p e C will turn on case sensitivity if the index supports it e D will turn on diacritics sensitivity if the index supports it A weight can be specified for a guery element by specifying a decimal value at the start of the modifiers Example Import ant 2 5 Recoll user manual 26 51 3 6 Search case and diacritics sensitivity For Recoll versions 1 18 and later and when working with a raw index not the default
43. ased or unac cented 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 size for filtering the results on file size Example size lt 10000 You can use lt gt or as operators You can specify a range like the following size gt 100 size lt 1000 Theusualk K m M g G t T can be used as decimal multipliers Ex size gt 1k to search for files bigger than 1000 bytes Recoll user manual 25 51 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 2001 03 01 2002 05 01 the basic syntax for an interval of dates 2001 03 01 P1Y2M the same specified with a
44. avoids cluttering the more user oriented and locally customized skippedNames 5 4 4 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 5 The mimeview file mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Open link in a result list le 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 evinc
45. 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 Recoll user manual 49 51 5 4 3 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 mimemap also has a recoll_noindex variable which is a list of suffixes Matching files will be skipped which avoids unnecessary decompressions or file executions This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the main configuration file with a few differences it will not affect directories it cannot be made dependant on the file system location it is a configuration wide parameter and the file names will still be indexed not even the file names are indexed for patterns in skippedNames recoll_noindex is used mostly for things known to be unindexable by a given Recoll version Having it there
46. can sometimes be found in a separate package 4 3 2 2 Recoll package The reco11 package contains two modules e The reco11 module contains functions and classes used to query or update the index e The rclextract module contains functions and classes used to access document data 4 3 2 3 The recoll module 4 3 2 3 1 Functions connect confdir None extra_dbs None writable False The connect function connects to one or several Recoll in dex es and returns a Db object confdir may specify a configuration directory The usual defaults apply extra_dbs isa list of additional indexes Xapian directories 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 4 3 2 3 2 Classes 4 3 2 3 2 1 The Db class A Db object is created by a connect function 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 Quer y 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 diacs
47. 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 disable gtgui Disable the Qt interface Will allow building the indexer and the command line search program in absence of a Qt environment disable xl1mon Disable X11 connection monitoring inside recollindex Together with disable qtgui this allows building recoll without Qt and X11 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 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 I
48. cript 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
49. ctly r sum 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 e x which matches O or more characters e which matches a single character 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 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 6 domain com can sometimes be very useful Recoll user manual 27 51 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 f
50. d to index different areas of the file system to different indexes For example if you were to issue the following commands Recoll user manual 5 51 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 e 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 co
51. dditional 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 12 1 The result list format The result list presentation can be exhaustively customized by adjusting two elements The paragraph format e HTML code inside the header section These can be edited from the Result list tab of the GUI configuration Newer versions of Recoll from 1 17 use a WebKit HTML object by default this may be disabled at build time and total customisation is possible with full support for CSS and Javascript Conversely there are limits to what you can do with the older Ot OTextBrowser but still it is possible to decide what data each result will contain and how it will be displayed No more detail will be given about the header part only useful with the WebKit build if there are restrictions to what you can do they are beyond this author s HTML CSS Javascript abil
52. e configuration defining what should be done with fields the fields file If the name for the met a 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 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 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 Recoll user manual 33 51 e 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 doc
53. e reco11_noindex variable in mimemap for an alternative approach which indexes the file names 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 and FNM_LEADING_DIR flags 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 filter 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 filter and install a supplementary Python module The details are described on the Recoll wiki followLinks Specifies if the indexer should follow symbolic links while
54. e 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 D Document date 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 F Original file name Same as f except if a temporary file is used e 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 Recoll user manual 50 51 ZM Mime type p Page index Only significant
55. ed 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 le 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 1BM 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 11 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 helpful gui Ajusting the result table columns When displaying results
56. ens False lang english Expand an expres sion against the index term list Performs the basic function from the GUI term explorer tool mat ch_t ype can be either of wildcard regexp or stem Returns a list of terms expanded from the input expression Recoll user manual 35 51 4 3 2 3 2 2 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 guery_string a Recoll search lan guage 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 us
57. er 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 Ul The API is inspired by the Python database API specification There were two major changes in recent Recoll versions 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 e The recoll module became a package with an internal reco11 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 Recoll user manual 34 51 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
58. er 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 lt span class rclmatch gt lt span gt 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 1 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 4 3 2 3 2 3 The Doc class A Doc object contains index data for a given document T
59. erface 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 filters for new types of documents The processing of metadata attributes for documents fields is highly configurable 4 1 Writing a document filter Recoll filters 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 may be text plain ortext html Most filters are executable programs or scripts A few filters 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 filters Simple filters exec filters 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 text plain or text html Multiple filters execm filters run as long as their master process recollindex is active They 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 comp
60. et 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 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
61. exing script later application x blobapp exec rclblob Underthe 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 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 rc1b1ob filter 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 a filter
62. fields 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 rclmultil somecmd f If somecmd returns data in the form of fieldl valuel field2 value for field2 fieldl and field2 will be set inside the document metadata 5 4 1 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 guotes here Recoll user manual 46 5
63. 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 AA AA Aa 66 O6 Note that the translation is not limited to a single character you could very well have something like 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 guerying If you have document sets which would need different values you will have to index and guery 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 localf ields rclaptg gnus other val then select specifier viewer with mimetype tag inmimeview noxattr
64. 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 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 U 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 6 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 volumel docdir net server volumel docdir server volume2 docdir net server volume2 docdir 5 4 7 Examples of configuration adjustments 5 4 7 1 Adding an external viewer for an non indexed type Imagine that you have some kind of file which does not have inde
65. 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 Ouery Language mode where you have to care about the syntax You can use the ToolsAdvanced 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
66. he 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 inthe 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 Recoll user manual 36 51 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 4 3 2 3 2 4 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
67. ieW 41 5 4 1 The main configuration file recoll conf 43 5 4 1 1 Parameters affecting what documents we index 43 Recoll user manual vii 5 4 2 5 4 3 5 4 4 5 4 5 5 4 6 5 4 7 5 4 1 2 Parameters affecting how we generate terms 44 5 4 1 3 Parameters affecting where and how we store things 45 5 4 1 4 Parameters affecting multithread processing 46 5 4 1 5 Miscellaneous parameters 47 Uhedields fil amp i 5 5 4 bok mas ou a 8 Bar a 48 5 4 2 1 Extended attributes in the fields file 48 Themimemap file pax 344 45364 dub mr Edo ee a a de 49 The mimeconf file JL o a ee dis SS RE signe ed ee Bo din 49 Themimeview TUe ai sat e AAA an oe 49 Theptransdl amp cs 6 ea maps de Shwe bee LEA os EP GARE Eee a 50 Examples of configuration adjustments 50 5 4 7 1 Adding an external viewer for an non indexed type 50 5 4 7 2 Adding indexing support for a new file type 51 Abstract Permission is granted to copy distribute and or modify this document under the terms o f the GNU Free Documentation License Version 1 3 or any later version published by th e Free Software Founda
68. ier section Recoll currently manages the following default fields title subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject author or from for searching the documents originators recipient or to for searching the documents recipients keyword for searching the document specified keywords few documents actually have any filename for the document s file name ext specifies the file name extension Ex ext html The field syntax also supports a few field like but special criteria e 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 gt 1 15 8 A tilde inside the value will be expanded to the home directory 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 dimh reco Midir sia CMe Els Canta Common This would select results which have both reco11 and src in the path in any order and which have not either ut ils 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 c
69. ined 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 SHOME reco11 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 Recoll user manual 4 51 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
70. ion 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 impos sible because each term needs to be expanded and all combinations searched for the multiplicative expansion may become unmanageable Recoll user manual 7 51 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 pa
71. ities There are a few examples on the page about customising the result list on the Recoll web site 3 1 12 1 1 The paragraph format This is an arbitrary HTML string where the following printf like 2 substitutions will be performed A Abstract D Date 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 K Keywords if any L Precooked Preview Edit and possibly Snippets links ZM Mime type N result Number inside the result page R Relevance percentage S Size information T Title or Filename if not set t Title or Filename if not set U Url Recoll user manual 21 51 The format of the Preview Edit and Snippets links is lt a href PSN gt lt a href ESN gt and lt a href A N gt where docnum N expands to the document number inside the result page 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 custo
72. licated than the older kind Most of new filters are written in Python using a common module to handle the protocol There is an exception rclimg which 1s written in Perl The subdocuments output by these filters can be directly indexable text or HTML or they can be other simple or compound documents that will need to be processed by another filter In both cases filters 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 In the extreme case of a simple filter returning a document in text plain format no metadata can be transferred from the filter to the indexer Generic metadata like document size or modification date will be gathered and stored by the indexer Filters 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 filters 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 filters and the next one gives a few explanations
73. 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 Ese 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 12 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 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 0000 The default is blue 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
74. ll indexing is normally incremental documents will only be processed if they have been modified 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 The following sections give an overview of different aspects of the indexing processes and configuration with links to detailed sections 2 1 1 Indexing modes Recoll indexing can be performed along two different modes e 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 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 conta
75. llindex 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 Comment starts with or empty e Parameter affectation name value e 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 separa
76. ly has free memory you can try higher values between 20 and 80 In my experience values beyond 100 are always counterproductive 5 4 1 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 c
77. m 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 filters 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 filters 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 filters and described in the fields configuration file Fields can be indexed meaning that their terms are separately stored in inverted lists with a specific prefix and that a field specific search 1s possible 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 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 th
78. m local configuration to be useful An example candidate would be the recipient field which is generated by the message filters The default value for the paragraph format string is lt img src I align left gt R S SL amp nbsp amp nbsp lt b gt T lt b gt lt br gt M amp nbsp D amp nbsp snbsp nbsp lt i gt U lt i gt amp nbsp Si lt br gt ASE oe oe You may for example try the following for a more web like experience lt u gt lt b gt lt a href P3N gt T lt a gt lt b gt lt u gt lt br gt A lt font color 008000 gt U S lt font gt L Note that the P N link in the above paragraph makes the title a preview link Or the clean looking lt img src I align left gt L lt font color 900000 gt R lt font gt amp nbsp amp nbsp lt b gt T amp lt b gt lt br gt S nbsp lt font color 808080 gt lt i gt U lt i gt lt font gt lt table bgcolor ffe0e0e0 gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt div gt A lt div gt lt td gt lt tr gt lt table gt 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 simila
79. ms 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 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 le 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 U
80. ndexed 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 filter specific sections Some filters may need specific configuration for handling fields Only the email message filter 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 filter 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 mail Extract the X My Tag mail header and use it internally with the mailmytag field name x my tag mailmytag 5 4 2 1 Extended attributes in the fields file Recoll versions 1 19 and later process user extended file attributes as documents fields
81. nfiguration parameters Also the log file will only be truncated when the daemon starts If the daemon runs permanently the log file may grow guite big depending on the log level When building Recoll the real time indexing support can be customised during package configuration with the with out famor 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 adeguate in most cases 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 Recoll user manual 10 51 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
82. ng 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 guite 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 conseguence it was impossible to search for a particular capitalization of a term US us or to discriminate two terms based on diacritics sake sak mate mat 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 guery 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
83. nstallation Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix in the root of the source tree This will copy the com mands to prefix bin and the sample configuration files scripts and other shared data to prefix share recoll Tf the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from either the system default or the value which was specified when ex ecuting 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 recol 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 SHOME 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 guite possible to use both ways Recoll user manual 42 51 The most accurate documentation for the configuration parameters is given by comments inside the default files and we will jus
84. 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 R sum the former will store resume the latter R sum 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 r sum Read the sect
85. on 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 gt 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 S SHOME 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 discarded You may want to change this by setting the daemlogfi lename and daemloglevel co
86. one The test of identity is based on an MDS 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 Recoll user manual 17 51 3 1 11 Search tips shortcuts 3 1 11 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 garden ing if you enter Garden instead of garden This is the only case
87. or case and diacritics This is not true any more for versions 19 and later Using a x 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 x 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
88. ore 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 x 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 Recoll user manual 11 51 White space in the entry should match white space in the file name and is not treated specially The search is insensitive to character case and accents independantly of the type of index e An entry without any wild card character and not capitalized will be prepended and appended with ie etc gt etc but Etc gt etc 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 guotes 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
89. orresponding 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 ChroSires 2 2 2 eion Nero 42 dL Recoll user manual 47 51 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 CAO shes 2 Ib Sil woe Nu SES 6 dl Gl The following example would disable multithreading Indexing will be performed by a single thread cnul 1 il Sil 5 4 1 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
90. ould 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 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 Recoll user manual 12 51 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
91. pecified in the header or ut 8 by default e text rtf is processed by unrtf which outputs text html The iso 8859 1 encoding is specified because it is not the ut 8 default and not output by unrtf in the HTML header section application x chm is processed by a persistant filter This is determined by the execm keyword 4 1 4 Filter HTML output The output HTML could be very minimal like the following example lt html gt lt head gt lt meta http eguiv Content Type content text html charset UTF 8 gt lt head gt lt body gt Some text content lt body gt lt html gt You should take care to escape some characters inside the text by transforming them into appropriate entities At the very minimum amp should be transformed into samp lt should be transformed into amp 1t 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 lt pre gt 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
92. pendencies After extracting the tar file you can proceed with installation as if you had built the package from source that is just type make install The binary trees are built for installation to usr local 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 Recoll user manual 39 51 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 filters 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 the Recoll helper applications page 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 the Recoll helper applications page if a file type is important to you
93. period 2001 from the beginning of 2001 to the latest date in the index 2001 the whole year of 2001 P2D means 2 days ago up to now if there are no documents with dates in the future 2003 all documents from 2003 or older Periods can also be specified with small letters ie p2y 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 typeorrclcat 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 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 exp
94. pt language JavaScript gt function recollsearch var t document getSelection window location href recoll search guery gtp ra amp p 0 amp g encodeURIComponent t lt script lt body ondblclick recollsearch gt 3 3 Searching on the command line There are several ways to obtain search results as a text stream without a graphical interface By passing option t to the recoll program By using the recollg program e 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 guery to be executed is specified as command line arguments recollg 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 recollg has a man page not installed by default look in the doc man directory The Usage string is as follows recollg usage P Show the date span for all the documents present in the index Sal el el serer strne 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 wd 262 Eivleses OR nas prdloritys cL OR C2 CS Ou tA mecmes cl OI t2 AND G2 OR w4 Phrase tl t2 needs
95. r 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 gualify them for full text indexing or for all files inside the selected subtrees independently of mime type usesystemfilecommand Decide if we use the file i system command 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 processwebgueue If this is set process the directory where Web browser plugins copy visited pages for indexing webgueuedir 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 1 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
96. r 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 recol1 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 lt a href reco11 gt links around some document areas or automat ically by adding a very small javascript program to the documents like the following example which would initiate a search by double clicking any term Recoll user manual 22 51 lt scri
97. rameters 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 guite 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 gueue directory which Recoll then processes indexing the data storing it into a local cache then removing the file from the gueue
98. rch case and diacritics sensitivity ee 26 3 7 Anchored searches and wildcards 26 3 7 1 More about wildcards 26 3 7 1 1 Wildcards and path filtering 27 3 72 Anchored searches 9 se 2 Li RR se Luna a eue ee ste a 27 30 Desktopantesration 2 2 dn eee A ee EUR eae DE ds DONS RS GWIR EY DN 2I 3 51 Hotkeyingrecoll e e bd en dd di YH a e ERE amp a 27 3 8 2 The KDE Kicker Recoll applet FI a 28 Recoll user manual vi 4 Programming interface 29 41 Writing a document filter 29 4 1 1 Sunpl filfers sc oe a se sua ds Lun MU LR a Aa 30 4 12 Multiple filters ss 4 age aa e ad num dansant A amp ER 30 4 1 3 Telling Recoll about the filter 30 4 1 4 Filter HTML output eg sr ee NS MENU RH Be RR SE EE A ee ee 8 31 Ao Page numbers y a a ane ANR Ee de Ain es Bs eis O dy DO IG Aes Sn 32 4 2 Fielddataprocessing 5 2 4 44 4 Lund b a DE dd RE RR be ee de E ee E a 32 43 ABL A E RN 33 4 3 JHnteriacerelementS ess Srl as AA o Ae UDD do SS 33 43 22 Pythonint rface me 585 see ee LU yd Gh RD EU OO RR Dd ee ee be st 33 A321 Introduction 54 pora de EAN Sans A hrs sh a 43 22 Recoll package 2 45 644s pes as e Rw nus Lean 34 4 3 2 3 Therecollmodule o ue
99. resting repeated keywords 1e Subject for email when indexing This is not essential You should look at one of the simple filters for example rclps for a starting point Don t forget to make your filter executable before testing 4 1 2 Multiple filters If you can program and want to write an execm filter 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 relics 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 execn filters 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 Use ASCII or UTF 8 if the identifier is an integer print it for example like printf d would do If at all possible the data should make some kind of sense when printed to a log file to help with debugging Recoll uses a colon as a separator to store a complex path internally for deeper embedding Colons inside the ipath elements output by a filter will be escaped but would be a bad choice as a filter specific separator mostly again for debugging issues In any case the main goal is that it should be easy for the filter to extract the target document given the file name and the ipath element execn filters will also produce a document with a
100. revert to the text mode as soon as you edit the entry area 3 1 6 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 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 6 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 config urable for the following modes All terms Any term None of the terms e Phrase exact terms in order within an adjustable window Proximity terms in any order within an adjustable window 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
101. s 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 Exceptions when using the desktop preferences for opening documents these are mime types that will still be opened accord ing 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 Recoll user manual 19 51 Choose editor applications this will let you choose the command started by the Open links inside the result list for specific document types Display category filter as toolbar this will let you choose if the document categories are displayed as a list or a set of buttons 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 Start with advanced search dialog open If you use this dialog frequently checking the entries will get 1t to open when recoll starts Remember sort activation state if set Recoll will remember the sort tool stat between invocations It normally starts with sorting disabled Result list par
102. store 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 guerying while it is rebuilt which can be a significant advantage if it is very big some installations need days for a full index rebuild 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 i Trivial example Emam name indexable txt print recollindex if recollindex i will not descend in
103. t 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 en vironment 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 recol l 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 reco11 directory does not exist when recoll or reco
104. t but you are not interested in searching it setting noc jk 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 ap propriate 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 Recoll user manual 45 51 indexstemminglanguages A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be built See recollindex 1 or use the recollindex 1 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
105. t indexing pass unless they are also added in the configuration file 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 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 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 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 Synthetic abstract size adjust to taste Synthetic abstract context words how many words should be displayed around each term occurrence 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 Recoll user manual 20 51 External indexes This panel will let you browse for a
106. ter use a single Python filter based on mutagen for all audio file types 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 chm files in microsoft help format need Python and the pychm module which needs chmlib 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 Zip archives need Python and the standard zipfile module Rar archives need Python the rarfile Python module and the unrar utility Midi karaoke files need Python and the Midi module Kongueror webarchive format with Python uses the Tarfile module mimehtml web archive format support based on the email filter 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 filters need iconv and the standard sed and awk Recoll user manual 40 51 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
107. tgeist will enable sending Zeitgeist events about the visited search results and needs the qzeitgeist package disable webkit is available from version 1 17 to implement the result list with a Qt OTextBrowser instead of a WebKit widget if you do not or can t depend on the latter 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 disable python module will avoid building the Python module 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 Recoll user manual 41 51 nable camelcase will enable splitting came1Case 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 with file command Specify the version of the file
108. 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 ol0 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 ol0orsomefield sometermS 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 freguent 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 The KDE KIO Slave was described in a previous section If you use a recent version of Ubuntu Linux you may find the Ubuntu Unity Lens module useful There is also an independantly developed Krunner pl
109. tion inside lists List elements with embedded spaces can be guoted using double guotes Encoding issues Most of the configuration parameters are plain ASCII Two particular sets of values may cause encoding issues 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 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 Recoll user manual 43 51 5 4 1 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
110. tion 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 It currently describes Recoll 1 19 Recoll user manual 1 51 Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1 Givingita try If you do not like reading manuals who does and would like to give Recoll a try just install the application and start the recoll graphical user interface GUI which will ask 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 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 applications let you find your data by content rather than by external attributes like a file name More specifically they will let you specify words terms that should or should not appear in the text you are looking for and return a list of matching documents ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear
111. 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 recol 1 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 t The indexing process is started automatically the first time you execute the recoll GUI Indexing can also be performed by executing the recollindex command 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 a Ubuntu Unity Lens module Recoll user manual 3 51 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 Reco
112. to 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 x x x recollindex gt some tmp dir recolltrace 2 gt amp 1 Or using anacron 1 15 su mylogin c recollindex recollindex gt tmp rcltraceme 2 gt s amp 1 Recoll user manual 9 51 As of version 1 17 the Recoll GUI has dialogs to manage crontab entries for recollindex You can reach them from the Preferences gt 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 daem
113. ugin 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 Recoll user manual 28 51 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 Recoll user manual 29 51 Chapter 4 Programming int
114. ument 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 i path 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 index
115. urse 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 070
116. using a sophisticated probabilistic ranking model Recoll provides the mechanisms and interface to get data into and out of the system In practice Xapian works by remembering where terms appear in your document files The acquisition process is called indexing Recoll user manual 2 51 The resulting 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 with different character sets encodings and languages into the same index It has input filters for many document types 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 stemmi
117. uu ea pa aa en RAG REA de a le 34 43231 Functions 4 Ge RR RR De bas bis DRE me deu ie dd wo 34 4323 2 Class s oy sees vins E DOR bee SR EME OEM eR GR 34 4 3 2 3 2 1 The DECIASSH SALES CH Ad GS ES ae aa as amp 34 4 3 2 3 2 2 The Query Class ici Lente dE po I OR ROE dre 35 4 3 2 3 2 3 The Doc class ee ns er ra o a ea e a By OR BM G1 O 33 4 3 2 3 2 4 The SearchData class 36 4 3 2 4 Therclextractmodule lt s sp ed rra pes de Oe RE BH Ud Eee me n e 36 AGOA Classes 4 5 62453 Pb teow ee SS A eee ES 36 4 3 2 4 1 1 The Extractor Class serie e MERE A mans het E 36 43 25 Examplecod voii mia aude BR ROB BO Bu WY in udd mus es 36 4 3 2 6 Compatibility with the previous version 37 5__ Installation and configuration 38 5 1 Installing a Binary COPY tm A RO RS Re EARS RA e A AR ee ee 38 5 1 1 Installing through a package system 38 5 1 2 Installing a prebuilt Recoll 38 92 Supports packages ear SRE SD ES MAS Eee UR SAME ERAS Og 38 5 3 Building from soufce s oocq ose 3 4 du b des E ah RR PR hd 40 5 3 1 Prerequisites o opose du ee yB Ee a Ryn ee WE O y yD oh He a 40 D392 BUGIS ae ee ae Ryd A NO e GWE EDD we EA Yy O NE Bue 40 5321 BuildmgonSolaris lt lt REE ee ee RR OU bo 41 23 37 Installation 22 2 240444 o a o db eS 48 41 5 4 Configuration overv
118. w 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 Recoll user manual 14 51 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
119. 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 11 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 add
120. xable 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 e In SRECOLL_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 diese1 0i1 just the same In SRECOLL 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 Su 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 Recoll user manual 51 51 5 4 7 2 Adding indexing support for a new file type Let us now imagine that the above b1 ob 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 e Under the index section add the following line more about the rc1b10b ind
121. xing 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 re

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