[System] Baloo keeps crashing on boot, file search doesn't work

[Campeador Cid]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to Kubuntu, trying to make the transition from Windows.

Starting at some point in the last several months, every time I reboot Kubuntu (18.04 LTS), soon afterward a notification pops up saying that Baloo has crashed. The exact wording is as follows:

Baloo file indexing daemon closed unexpectedly

The upshot of this is that the file/content search function in Dolphin doesn't work: it never finds anything. The progress bar just keeps "Searching," going back and forth, back and forth, without ever finishing up. I can navigate normally around the directories, though.

Is there a way to fix this, and if so then how? Please bear in mind that I'm a Windows refugee and in no way expert on Linux, particularly the command line.

Thanks for any help that you can give.

[jlittle]

To answer your question, in a konsole,

$ balooctl disable
$ rm ~/.local/share/baloo/*
$ balooctl enable

baloo will regenerate its index if you delete it.

However, IMO save yourself a lot of trouble and disable file search. See here and here for a couple of my recent rants about baloo.

In dolphin after you click search there's an option "More Search Tools", and I find KFind works.

[Campeador Cid]

Thanks, the CLI was giving me grief about the file indexer running or something. (I'd tried "disable," "enable" and "status" so many times that I lost track.) I ended up killing the Baloo process in KSysGuard, and was able to start it again. After rebuilding the index, the file and content search function is working again (for now).

However, using KFile under "More search options" didn't return any results for the same content search. It looked around for a few seconds, then went back to "Idle" with "0 files found."

Maybe I'll try rebooting and see if Baloo crashes again.

[GreyGeek]

I use the locate command in a Konsole to search for things. It is lightening fast.
Use "man locate" for the manual page on how to use it.
You can use "sudo updatedb" to manually update the locate database, but a cron job, mlocate in /etc/cron.daily, does that every day.

[Campeador Cid]

I rebooted tonight and Baloo didn't crash again. Could it be that the index was corrupted, and rebuilding it fixed the problem?

OTOH, KFind in Konqueror, which I installed earlier today as a possible replacement for Dolphin, isn't finding anything at all. I saw a "mozilla.pdf" file in my Home folder and started a KFind search with the name of that file visible, and still KFfind couldn't, errr, find it.

Think I'll stick with Dolphin for the time being, at least until it messes up again. Thanks for the ideas, they helped me to learn a little about the CLI and how to fix the Baloo index that way. A little less fearful of Konsole now than I was this morning.

[jlittle]

... Baloo didn't crash again. Could it be that the index was corrupted, and rebuilding it fixed the problem?

Definitely, until the next time. Crashing is one of the more benign failure modes baloo has. Looping i/o bound writing data (and so shortening the life of any SSD used), using many GB to index a few GB, and thrashing the system to unusability for minutes on login have been reported here.

...KFind...

Sorry, I should have mentioned that it doesn't do content indexing. I use grep and derivatives for that, not very good for complex objects like word processing documents or files with metadata like music or images.

The indexing of files comes from the use of storage that's slow at random access, and not needed with SSDs. I suppose my perspective is limited by my small amounts of data.

[Don B. Cilly]

A little less fearful of Konsole now than I was this morning.

Keep at it :·)
As long as you don't type anything beginning with "s" in there, there's really not much to be afraid of ;·)

See, most of the power of Linux systems resides within that little tool.
Try the locate command. It really is quite powerful. It's also incredibly fast.
It can find too many things, and it can be dodgy to narrow the search... but pretty much in the same way as Doplhin/Baloo's search function.

E.g., locate mozilla (or locate mozil ;·) will make the screen scroll thousands of lines.
So would locate pdf
locate mozilla.pdf will find the relevant file really quickly.

Honestly, try it, get used to it a little. You'll see what I mean.
Tip: if you try to locate something that's been added recently, and the database hasn't been updated yet (a common case, in some cases ;·), just type
sudo updatedb (which will take a few seconds, not many).

O my dog, I just typed something beginning with "s". The hidden power of konsole is about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world system, my backup is only two hours old... get used to it, live dangerously, it's more fun :·))

[EDIT] While I'm at it. Another tip. Say you want to locate something called Obnoxiousname.txt. You can't remember if it had a capital O or not - or if it was obnoxiousthing.pdf. locate noxiou will find it.

[Campeador Cid]

Definitely, until the next time. Crashing is one of the more benign failure modes baloo has. Looping i/o bound writing data (and so shortening the life of any SSD used), using many GB to index a few GB, and thrashing the system to unusability for minutes on login have been reported here.

Uh-oh, I have Kubuntu installed on an SSD! Thanks for the heads-up.

I guess that next time there's a crash, I'll have to bite the bullet and consent to letting the developers contact me for the details, maybe that'll help to speed up the process of fixing these issues. It'll be another learning experience.

[Campeador Cid]

Keep at it :·)

Thank you, I will! This could be very instructive.

Quick question -- imagine the following scenario. Suppose that you know that you have a document file somewhere that mentions Julius Caesar, but you just can't remember what file it was. So you'll need to do a search of file contents instead of a search by filename. How would you do that in the CLI?

[Don B. Cilly]

If you have a vague idea which folder it was in, go there (with Dolphin), either press F4 to open a small pop-up konsole, or right click on an "empty" space" and actions -> open terminal.
Then type
grep aesar *
or grep ulius *
(in case of dubious caps, you know ;·)

To grep in subdirectories as well, use grep -R aesar *.
Or grep -R aesar *.txt and such.

If you have no idea where the thing was... try some cod liver oil... er... well, it gets slightly more complicated... :·)

[Campeador Cid]

LOL, and thanks for the tips.

That's a good starting point for experimenting -- I appreciate it!