rchive

name	rchive
description	Use when building, indexing, or querying local XML record archives from NCBI Entrez databases, creating inverted indices, or managing PubMed local caches.
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true

rchive

rchive is the EDirect local-archive workhorse. The shell script in bin/ is only a platform dispatcher; it locates and execs a compiled binary such as rchive.Linux.

Quick Start

• Command: rchive
• Local wrapper: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/rchive
• Version path: rchive -version

When To Use This Tool

• Creating Entrez index XML from PubMed/Entrez records (-e2index)
• Generating inverted indices for fast term searching (-e2invert, -merge)
• Building local record caches with optional gzip compression (-archive, -gzip)
• Querying indexed archives with Boolean formulas (-query, -title, -exact)

Common Patterns

# 1) Inspect available archive/index flags
rchive --help
rchive -version

# 2) Create Entrez index XML from input records
cat records.xml | rchive -strict -e2index

# 3) Query an existing local postings directory
rchive -path /data/postings -query 'brca1 AND breast'

Recommended Workflow

1. Decide whether you are archiving raw XML (-archive / -fetch) or working on the index side (-e2index, -e2invert, -merge, -promote).
2. Verify the wrapper can find the platform binary with rchive -version before launching long archive jobs.
3. Feed valid XML from stdin or use -input when building indexes.
4. Separate archive storage, postings storage, and scratch space early because local-cache trees grow quickly.

Guardrails

• rchive -version prints a clean 24.0, but rchive --version is not equivalent; in local testing it fell through to a no-input error.
• The wrapper script resets PATH and then execs a platform-specific binary such as rchive.Linux; if that compiled binary is missing it prints download instructions instead of running.
• --help produced the full built-in help document in this environment, listing archive, index, query, and postings-management flags.
• This is an operational local-archive tool, not a harmless inspector. Many flags create, merge, or delete cache/index artifacts.
• XML-consuming modes require real stdin or -input; otherwise you can hit No data supplied to rchive from stdin or file.