Beagle

Blocate

If for some reason you do not want to run beagled continuously as a daemon, blocate is a tool to query the indexes built by beagle. blocate, beagle-build-index work similar to the locate, updatedb tools.

You should realize that if beagled is not running continuously, you will not get new results or modifications until you update the index. Few memory and CPU related problems have been reported with the last few beagle releases so there is really not much to gain by not running beagled in the background.

beagle-build-index

This is the best way to create a file system index. See Static Indexes for information on this.

beagled

If you want to create non-filesystem indexes e.g. for emails or chat backends but do not want beagled to run in the background, pass --indexing-test-mode to beagled. To selectively run only certain backends, use beagle-settings to enable/disable the backends of your choice or use beagle-config.

blocate

Once you have created your index, you can use blocate to search in them.

Important: you cannot run blocate if beagled is running (there is also no reason to do so).

blocate by default queries the backends specified in ~/.beagle/config/blocate.conf or /etc/beagle/config/blocate.conf.

To add/remove the backends to query, add the name of the backends or the path to static indexes in the blocate.conf file.

To override the conf file and search only in one backend or static index, pass to blocate the parameter -d NAME (substitute NAME by the name of the backend) or -d PATH (substitute PATH by the full path of the static index). The -d parameter can be repeated to specify multiple backends.

Example:

Search for 'konqueror' in the default blocate indexes.

 $ blocate konqueror

Search for 'konqueror' in the manpages system index.

 $ blocate -d manpages konqueror

Search for 'konqueror' in the local KMail index.

 $ blocate -d KMail konqueror

Search for 'konqueror' in the personal static index that I created for my pictures.

 $ blocate -d ~/.pictureindex konqueror