Beagle Crawl System
The primary function of the Beagle Crawl System is creating system-wide indexes available to all users, in order to avoid duplication.
Examples of files that most users are likely to want indexed are documents in /usr/share/doc and applications in /usr/share/applications.
After having crawled these directories, the generated indexes will be automatically used by the users' beagled and the files made available in the search results.
Configuration
By default, the Beagle Crawl System pulls its configuration from the /etc/beagle/crawl-* files. You can edit the files available by default, and add new ones respecting the self-explanatory syntax.
Implementation
The Crawl System is mostly geared towards indexing non-volatile system directories, and as such it makes use of Static Indexes. These indexes will be stored in /var/cache/beagle, one set of files for each crawl-* rule defined.
By default, the indexes will be updated once a day: the creation and update of the indexes is handled by a cron job, normally installed by Beagle in /etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system.
To view the current list of system-wide indexes, type
$ /etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system --list
If you make modifications to the crawl-* files, you can also run this executable file (as root), to force immediate update of the indexes. Note that this is expected to be a time-consuming process, depending on the modifications you've made. If you want to update the index for only one crawl file, run as root #/etc/cron.daily/beagle-crawl-system <name of crawl-file>. Running beagled will automatically pick up any modification to the indexes.
