1DOODLE(1) General Commands Manual DOODLE(1)
2
6 doodle - a tool to search the meta-data in your files
7
10 doodle [OPTIONS] ([FILENAMES]*|[KEYWORDS]*)
11
14 doodle is a tool to index files. doodle uses libextractor to find
15 meta-data in files. Once a database has been built, doodle can be used
16 to quickly find files of which the meta-data matches a given
17 search-string. This way, doodle can be used to quickly search your
18 file system.
19 Generally, the first time you run doodle you pass the option -b to
21 build the database. Together with -b you specify the list of files or
22 directories to index, for example
23 $ doodle -b $HOME
25 Indexing with doodle is incremental. If doodle -b is run (with the
28 same database) twice it will update the index for files that were
29 changed. doodle will also remove files that are no longer accessible.
30 doodle will NOT remove files that are still present but no longer spec‐
31 ified in the argument list. Thus invoking either
32 $ doodle -b /foo /bar # or
34 $ doodle -b /foo ; doodle -b /bar
36 will result in the same database containing both the index for /foo and
39 /bar. Note that the only way to only un-index /foo at this point is to
40 make /foo inaccessible (using for example chmod 000 /foo or even rm -rf
41 /foo) and then run doodle -b again.
42 In networked environments, it often makes sense to build a database at
45 the root of each file system, containing the entries for that file
46 system. For this, doodle is run for each file system on the file
47 server where that file system is on a local disk, to prevent thrashing
48 the network. Users can select which databases doodle searches. Data‐
49 bases cannot be concatenated together.
50 Once the files have been indexed, you can quickly query the doodle
53 database. Just run
54 $ doodle keyword
56 to search all of your files for keyword. Note that only the meta-data
59 extracted by libextractor is searched. Thus if libextractor does not
60 find any meta-data in the files, you may not get any results. You can
61 use the option -l to specify non-standard libextractor plugins. For
62 example, doodle could be used to replace the locate tool from the GNU
63 findutils like this:
64 $ alias updatedb="doodle -bn -d ~/.doodle-locate-db -l libex‐
66 tractor_filename /"
67 $ alias locate="doodle -d ~/.doodle-locate-db"
69
73 -a NUMBER, --approximate=NUMBER
74 do approximate matching with mismatches of up to NUMBER letters
75 -b, --build
77 build the doodle database (passed arguments are directories and
78 filenames that are to be indexed). In comparison with GNU
79 locate the doodle binary encapsulates both the locate and the
80 updatedb tool. Using the -b option doodle builds or updates the
81 database (equivalent to updatedb), without -b it behaves similar
82 to locate.
83 -d FILENAME, --database=FILENAME
85 use FILENAME for the location of the database (use when building
86 or searching). This option is particularly useful when doodle
87 is used to search different types of files (or is operated with
88 different extractor options). Using this option doodle can be
89 used to build specialized indices (i.e. one per file system),
90 which can in turn improve search performance. When searching,
91 you can pass a colon-separated list of database file names, in
92 that case all databases are searched. Note that the disk-space
93 consumption of a single database is typically slightly smaller
94 than if the database is split into multiple files. Neverthe‐
95 less, the space-savings are likely to be small (a few percent).
96 You can also use the environment variable DOODLE_PATH to set
97 the list of database files to search. The option overrides the
98 environment variable if both are used. If the option is not
99 given and DOODLE_PATH is not set, "~/.doodle" is used.
100 -e, --extract
102 print the extracted keywords for each matching file found. Note
103 that this will slow down the program a lot, especially if there
104 are many matches in the database. Note that if the options
105 given for libextractor are different than the options used for
106 building the index the results may not contain the search
107 string.
108 -f, --filenames
110 include filenames (full path) in the set of keywords
111 -h, --help
113 print help page
114 -i, --ignore-case
116 be case-insensitive
117 -l LIBRARIES, --library=LIBRARIES
119 specify which libextractor plugins to use (for building the
120 index with -b or for printing information about files with -e)
121 -L FILENAME, --log=FILENAME
123 log all encountered keywords into a log file named FILENAME.
124 This option is mostly useful for debugging.
125 -m LIMIT, --memory=LIMIT
127 use at most LIMIT MB of memory for the nodes of the suffix-tree
128 (after that, serialize to disk). Note that a smaller value will
129 reduce memory consumption but increase the size of the temporary
130 file (and slow down indexing). The default is 8 MB.
131 -n, --nodefault
133 do not load the default set of plugins (only load plugins speci‐
134 fied with -l)
135 -p, --print
137 make a human-readable screen dump of the doodle database (only
138 really useful for debugging)
139 -P PATH, --prunepaths=PATH
141 Directories to not put in the database, which would otherwise
142 be. The environment variable PRUNEPATHS also sets this value.
143 Default is "/tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /dev /proc /sys". This
144 option can also be used when searching, in which case search
145 results in the specified directories will be ignored.
146 -v, --version
148 print the version number
149 -V, --verbose
151 be verbose
152
155 DOODLE_PATH
156 Colon-separated list of databases to search. Note that when
157 building the database this path must either only contain one
158 filename or the option -b must be used to specify the database
159 file. Default is "~/.doodle".
160 PRUNEPATHS
162 Space-separated list of paths to exclude. Can be overridden
163 with the -P option.
164
167 Doodle depends on libextractor. You can download libextractor from
168 http://gnunet.org/libextractor/.
169
172 extract(1), slocate(1), updatedb(1), libextractor(3), libdoodle(3)
173
176 libdoodle and doodle are released under the GPL.
177
180 Report bugs to mantis <https://gnunet.org/bugs/> or by sending elec‐
181 tronic mail to <christian@grothoff.org>
182
185 doodle was originally written by Christian Grothoff <chris‐
186 tian@grothoff.org>.
187
190 You can obtain the original author's latest version from
191 http://grothoff.org/christian/doodle/.
192doodle Jan 1 2010 DOODLE(1)