Finding files with Recoll

DIGGING IN

Article from Issue 79/2007
Author(s):

Whether you’re looking for a letter to the Internal Revenue Service or an email from an online trader, the Recoll desktop search machine will help you find it with just a few mouse clicks.

Even if you keep to a strict system of filing data and documents in a well-thought out directory struc ture, you’re bound to lose track of a file sooner or later, probably when you need it most. The file manager’s search func tion might help here, but unfortunately, it just checks for file names. If you’re lucky, you also might be able to check the content of text files, but that’s not much help if your OpenOffice file with the letter to the IRS is stored as 12112005fa. After grinding away at your hard disk for ages, the results are likely to be disappointing. Enter Recoll [1], your personal full text search engine (not to be confused with the Rekall database). Recoll searches for the keys you type, both in external attributes such as the file name and in the documents themselves. Just as in other desktop search engines like Beagle [2], Recoll creates an index to do this. The program has an impressive ar senal of utilities that help search through document content and relies on the Xapian [3] index engine.

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