XAPIAN-COMPACT(1)

💅 XAPIAN-COMPACT(1) — bestie edition 💅

okay so this is a page from the User Commands manual, and it's about xapian-compact, which is genuinely one of those little tools that eats. let me walk you through it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

xapian-compact — compact a database, or merge and compact several

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xapian-compact [OPTIONS] SOURCE_DATABASE... DESTINATION_DATABASE

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

xapian-compact — compact a database, or merge and compact several

like... that's the whole vibe. you give it one or more source databases and a destination, and it compacts/merges. iconic behavior tbh 💖

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -b, --blocksize=B — sets the blocksize in bytes (like 4096) or in K (like 4K). it must be between 2K and 64K and a power of 2, and the default is 8K. no cap, those are the rules ✨
• -B, --backend=B — sets the output backend. the supported values are 'glass' and 'honey'. by default the input's backend is used. at present only glass to honey conversion is implemented — otherwise the backend must be the same 👑
• -n, --no-full — disables full compaction
• -F, --fuller — no effect for glass since Xapian 1.4.31 (yeah, it's just vibing there 💀)
• -m, --multipass — if you're merging more than 3 databases, this merges the postlists in multiple passes. it's generally faster but requires more disk space for temporary files 🍓
• --no-renumber — preserves the numbering of document ids. useful if you have external references to them, or have set them to match unique ids from an external source. > heads up bestie: currently this option is only supported when merging databases if they have disjoint ranges of used document ids 😭
• -s, --single-file — produces a single file database
• --help — display this help and exit
• --version — output version information and exit

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💜 a little sign-off 💜

this page is from xapian-core 2.0.0, dated March 2026, and it's literally the XAPIAN-COMPACT(1) manual page. slay, go compact something, ily bye 💅✨🦋