Why is `$HOME` impossible to delete from File Search?

Help
1

Per

being forced to include $HOME in there confuses me:

  1. If I set it to “Not Indexed” yet index its parent (in this case /) does that mean that $HOME is specifically blacklisted from the index, or is the preference ignored because its hierarchical superior is indexed?
  2. If it is set to “Indexed”, do I waste CPU cycles indexing it 2 times?
2

i was confused about this as well (still am) because i had the enable check mark activated and only /home listed as ‘indexed’ for quite some time before coming here and asking why my photos and audio files had no meta data showing in dolphin.

once i added another folder below the /home in the list, then it finally started to index both that folder and the contents of home (images on my desktop started to show size info, etc) .

so i’m not sure why it’s there, as you still need to add a delete able folder for the indexing to start (even on /home)

1 Like
3

If your $HOME was set to “Indexed”, that sounds like a bug, @skyfishgoo.

4

To me this interface always behaved in some mysterious ways. I have three unwanted copies of my home directory in there and none can be deleted.

1 Like
5

On Linux with dedicated single partition, HOME is the only place where a regular user (non root) can download and paste their files without needing privileges. So it’s totally logical to have it as default indexed.

And you have the option to disable indexing on it, so there is no benefit from removing it.

Indexing “/” seems to be dangerous, you will have a big index plus high CPU usage after each install or upgrade for thousands of files that you will never search for like libraries and docs files.

6

@medin, there is rationale: I wouldn’t have to ascertain which of

are true or not, because I’d be able to simply index what I want.

7

Watch out if you are using Fedora, it has its own ideas about the default folders to index: ~/Documents, ~/Music, ~/Pictures and ~/Videos I think.

It seems to do something in the background with $HOME and you might need to manually edit ~/.config/baloofilerc and tidy up the references to it.

1 Like
8

That is definitely a bug.

1 Like
9

Yes, I managed to find the report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429910

Now I think that the “home” item being irremovable may not be the bug (it is intended), just the fact that it appears in multiple copies.

1 Like