How to delete the baloo index database file

baloo is a KDE desktop search component that indexes files in order to speed up the search.

The index can get quite large, e.g. my index consumes more than 2 GB of HDD space:

$ balooctl indexSize
Actual Size: 2,04 GiB
Expected Size: 1,33 GiB

           PostingDB:     313,32 MiB    22.924 %
         PosistionDB:     521,05 MiB    38.122 %
            DocTerms:     167,93 MiB    12.287 %
    DocFilenameTerms:      53,46 MiB     3.912 %
       DocXattrTerms:            0 B     0.000 %
              IdTree:       9,79 MiB     0.716 %
          IdFileName:      41,71 MiB     3.052 %
             DocTime:      25,80 MiB     1.887 %
             DocData:       2,02 MiB     0.148 %
   ContentIndexingDB:      14,86 MiB     1.087 %
         FailedIdsDB:            0 B     0.000 %
             MTimeDB:       9,12 MiB     0.667 %

If you don’t want to use baloo anyway or if you just want to re-index all files, you might want to delete the entire index:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/baloo

Note that if you haven’t disabled baloo using balooctl stop ; balooctl disable it might silently re-create the index in the background.