Ubuntu – How to stop a file or folder from being indexed in GNOME

directoryfilesgnomeindexingsearch

I am running Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18, and I would like to know if I can do any of the following and if so how:

Make it so that a folder is not indexed but leave its contents indexable (so that if I search for that folder's name in my system nothing will come up, but if I search for its contents, that will come up)
Make it so that a folder is not indexable and nor is any of its contents (and if it contains sub-folders within it then it should recursively not allow any contents in them to be indexed nor the contents of any sub-sub-folders in the sub-folders etc, nor any of those sub-folders themselves)
Make it so that individual files in a folder are not indexable, though not having any impact on other contents nor the parent-folder

So, are any of these variants possible? I believe the indexing program is called Tracker which indexes files and folders and their contents and allows for one to search for them on the system.

Best Answer

In Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 with GNOME 3.20 there is now such an application called Search and Indexing (or tracker-gui) installed by default (if it is not installed or if you are running a previous version which does not have it pre-installed then it can be installed by running sudo apt-get install tracker-gui) which one can use to highly flexibly change the indexing settings with (I have blacked out some personal information in one of the screenshots):

As can be seen from the above screenshots this covers most of the points in the question.

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Ubuntu – Indexing File Contents

You can try recoll, it is available in the repositories, it gives you a lot of control over the folders you want to index and search and where you want to store the index database, you can use multiple databases too, you can use the advanced search to return results from a specific folder.

See some of its features here, You can run it from the command line passing the query and other control terms to it, see the short manual here. Here the full manual.

Ubuntu – How to find all empty files and folders in a specific directory including files which just look empty but are not

From man find

    -empty File is empty and is either a regular file or a directory.

So to find both empty files and directories it is sufficient to do

find ~/lists -empty

To indicate the type, you could use the %y output format specifier

          %y     File's type (like in ls -l), U=unknown type (shouldn't happen)

e.g.

find ~/lists -empty -printf '%y %p\n'

or make use of an external program like ls, which includes a --classify option

    -F, --classify
          append indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries

i.e.

find ~/lists -empty -exec ls -Fd {} \;

If your definition of 'empty' is expanded to include files containing only whitespace characters, then it becomes more complicated - and more computationally intensive, since now you need to actually open at least any non-empty files and examine their contents. The most efficient way I can think of off the top of my head would be something like

find ~/list \( -empty -o \( -type f -a ! -exec grep -qm1 '[^[:blank:]]' {} \; \) \) -exec ls -Fd {} \;

(either empty, OR a file AND grep does not detect at least one non-blank character). Likely there is a better way though.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Indexing File Contents

Ubuntu – How to find all empty files and folders in a specific directory including files which just look empty but are not

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