Why is there a baloo_filemetadat process even though I have disabled baloo?

Question

Why is there a baloo_filemetad process, even though I have disabled baloo?

bruni@bruni-Inspiron-5547:~$ balooctl status
Baloo is currently disabled. To enable, please run balooctl enable
bruni@bruni-Inspiron-5547:~$ ps -A | grep baloo
12863 ?        00:00:00 baloo_filemetad

I am not interested in this purely academically, but this process is often the culprit when something is hanging in my system (I use a lot of mounted filesystems (mainly webdav and samba). I really love KDE since 4.3, but they always seemed to have a thing for file indexing and nonetheless never managed to get it right.

I am on Kubuntu 18.10, KDE Plasma Version 5.13.5.

What version of Kubuntu are you on? I'm currently on KDE neon 5.14 and have baloo enabled (running). Your ps -A command shows just baloo_file and baloorunner. But mine is a standalone system without anything else mounted; no samba. Maybe you could ask at https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/ and at https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum.php as well? — DK Bose, Jan 03 '19 at 10:23
@DKBose Thank you for the reply. "Your ps -A command shows just baloo_file and baloorunner". I do not understand that statement. I only see one process. — Bruni, Jan 03 '19 at 11:04
What I wrote was for my system using your command with baloo enabled. Those are the only two processes. No baloo_filemetad. That maybe because I don't have any mounted devices? But I googled for baloo_filemetad and came up empty. Which I why I suggested asking elsewhere in case people with more experience can help you. — DK Bose, Jan 03 '19 at 11:11

user26687 · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-04T14:54:58.687

baloo_filemetadata_temp_extractor ?

If the 'baloo_filemetad' is a truncated version of the 'baloo_filemetadata_temp_extractor':

By Rémi Verschelde in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332065#c32 :

..for metadata extraction to work on non-indexed files in Plasma 5, make sure that you have baloo-widgets installed on your distro (or the package containing /usr/bin/baloo_filemetadata_temp_extractor if named differently). This tool is the one used for on-the-fly extraction of metadata when Baloo's file indexing is off.

$ baloo_filemetadata_temp_extractor
Usage: baloo_filemetadata_temp_extractor url

Arguments:
  url

---Edit---

It seems that the 'ps -A' will truncate the output

With the:

$ watch -n 1 'ps -A | grep baloo'

With the KDE System Activity:

Why is there a baloo_filemetadat process even though I have disabled baloo?

1 Answers1