Real time monitoring/indexing is performed by starting the
recollindex -m
command.
With this option, recollindex will detach
from the terminal and become a daemon, permanently monitoring
file changes and updating the index.
Under KDE,
Gnome and some other desktop
environments, the daemon can automatically started when you log
in, by creating a desktop file inside the
~/.config/autostart
directory. This can be
done for you by the Recoll GUI. Use the
menu.
With older X11 setups, starting the daemon is normally performed as part of the user session script.
The rclmon.sh
script can be used to
easily start and stop the daemon. It can be found in the
examples
directory (typically
/usr/local/[share/]recoll/examples
).
For example, my out of fashion
xdm-based session has a
.xsession
script with the following lines
at the end:
recollconf=$HOME/.recoll-home recolldata=/usr/local/share/recoll RECOLL_CONFDIR=$recollconf $recolldata/examples/rclmon.sh start fvwm
The indexing daemon gets started, then the window manager, for which the session waits.
By default the
indexing daemon will monitor the state of the X11 session, and
exit when it finishes, it is not necessary to kill it
explicitly. (The X11 server
monitoring can be disabled with option -x
to
recollindex).
If you use the daemon completely out of an
X11 session, you need to add option
-x
to disable X11 session monitoring (else
the daemon will not start).
By default, the messages from the indexing daemon will be
discarded. You may want to change this by setting the
daemlogfilename
and
daemloglevel
configuration parameters. Also the
log file will only be truncated when the daemon starts. If the
daemon runs permanently, the log file may grow quite big, depending
on the log level.
When building Recoll, the real time indexing support can be
customised during package configuration with
the --with[out]-fam
or
--with[out]-inotify
options. The default is
currently to include inotify
monitoring on systems that support it, and, as of Recoll 1.17,
gamin support on
FreeBSD.
While it is convenient that data is indexed in real time, repeated indexing can generate a significant load on the system when files such as email folders change. Also, monitoring large file trees by itself significantly taxes system resources. You probably do not want to enable it if your system is short on resources. Periodic indexing is adequate in most cases.
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.