no segments* file found

Question

I need to access a lucene index ( created by crawling several webpages using Nutch) but it is giving the error shown above :

java.io.FileNotFoundException: no segments* file found in org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory@/home/<path>: files:
    at org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentInfos$FindSegmentsFile.run(SegmentInfos.java:516)
    at org.apache.lucene.index.IndexReader.open(IndexReader.java:185)
    at org.apache.lucene.index.IndexReader.open(IndexReader.java:148)
    at DictionaryGenerator.generateDict(DictionaryGenerator.java:24)
    at DictionaryGenerator.main(DictionaryGenerator.java:56)

I googled but the reasons given were not matching the requirements. The fact that files are being shown ( the path) probably means that the directory is not empty.
Thanks

Answer 1

Another hint, as I was having the same error and found that after creating indexes I did not close IndexWriter and it proved very unforgiven. In my indexdirectory I have some .lock files and no segments or segments.gen files which is what Reader is looking for. See here #3 for details