-------continued from part one--------


Search tips and additional information
--------------------------------------

1. Keep the initial search general, so as not to exclude posts of potential value. If you get back too many matches, you can narrow your search expression or your time frame.

2. Do not quote your search words unless you are looking for a string of words that must be in order. When you do quote, use single quotes: 'opera news', not "opera news".

3. Use double quotes only when you need an exact capitalization match: "BRAVO" will find "BRAVO", but not "Bravo" or "bravo".

4. Use the root or shortest form of a word to catch inflected forms, e.g. ticket will pick up ticket, tickets, ticketing, etc. Account for common misspellings and/or variants when searching, e.g.

SEARCH 'traveling show' OR 'travelling show' IN opera-L

Here, too, you might be better off using the NEAR operator:

SEARCH (traveling show) OR (travelling show) IN opera-L

turned up a post with "traveling minstrel show".

Note that the latter is identical to

SEARCH (traveling NEAR show) OR (travelling NEAR show) IN opera-L

5. Note that the item # of a given post (especially recent ones) may change over time as the listowner deletes some posts of limited interest from the archive.

6. There is an implicit NEAR between search words, so

SEARCH tosca price IN opera-L
is the same as:
SEARCH tosca NEAR price IN opera-L

If you are content to have the words or strings anywhere in the post, use AND:

SEARCH tosca AND price IN opera-L

If any of your criteria will suffice, use OR:

SEARCH 'four last songs' OR fls OR 'vier letzte lieder' OR vll IN Opera-L

Note that as you add words with NEAR, as in:

SEARCH red green blue IN opera-L
or
SEARCH red NEAR green NEAR blue IN opera-L
the first and last (red and blue in this case) may be father apart than red and green or green and blue. This is because the NEAR relationship is guaranteed only between adjacent words.

7. A convenient place to keep the "Summary of Basic Search Patterns" above is in the address book of your e-mail program. In Eudora, for instance, you could keep them on the NOTES page for your LISTSERV entry. Or you can bookmark this page.

8. Long search lines: your mail program is probably set for a width of 80 characters or less, and even if your long search line looks OK on the screen, it may get lopped off when you send it (in this case you will probably get back an error message in which you will be able to see that the entire line was not received). To send long searches that span more than one line, you must start with "// search" and end each but the last line with " ," (space comma). There must be a space after the // and before the comma(s). Also, don't let a quoted string span more than one line. Here's an example:

// SEARCH 'four last songs' OR fls OR 'vier letzte lieder' ,
OR vll IN Opera-L

9. Operator precedence: according to the manual, the AND operator has a higher precedence than OR; however, evaluation is, in fact, left to right, i.e.

SEARCH w1 OR w2 AND w3
is the same as
SEARCH (w1 OR w2) AND w3

SEARCH w1 AND w2 OR w3
is the same as
SEARCH (w1 AND w2) OR w3

Keep in mind that parentheses never hurt, and may ensure that your intended search is also that which is understood by the parsing portion of the search program.

10. The default operator for multiple-word searches in the subject line is AND rather than NEAR.

SEARCH * IN opera-L WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS (atlanta tosca)
is the same as
SEARCH * IN opera-L WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS (atlanta AND tosca)

This is logical, given that subject lines are short to begin with. In fact, NEAR is not permitted in the CONTAINS expression and SEARCH * IN opera-L WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS (atlanta NEAR tosca) returns an error message.

11. Catching up on missed mail: Catching up is easy if your list has a Web interface: just browse the Archives. Otherwise, if you missed a number of days of posts there are two ways to catch up via e-mail. The first is to request the relevant LOG file. Send listserv the message:
INDEX opera-L
(or whatever your list name). You will get back a listing of all the files that the list owner has made available. These may be special files as well as the list's LOG files, which contain the list's posts. Here is an excerpt from the opera-L filelist I received:
...
OPERA-L LOG9702A ... Started on Sat, 1 Feb 1997 ...
OPERA-L LOG9702B ... Started on Fri, 7 Feb 1997 ...
OPERA-L LOG9702C ... Started on Fri, 14 Feb 1997 ...
...

So if I was NOMAIL and want to see all the posts in 1997 from Feb 9th through the 11th, I would send listserv the message:

GET OPERA-L LOG9702B

If the dates of interest are not all in one file then I would have to get the other file(s) too (you can put another GET command on the next line). Note that these log files can be very large -- so large that you may not be able to view them with your mail reader! If you look at the menu in your mail program, there is usually a "Save as" option that saves an e-mail message to a file. Then you can open this file with your word processor. (LOG9702B was close to 400 pages long when I saved it as a file and opened it in Word!)

The second way to catch up is to use GETPOST to order just the posts for the three days in question. However, to do this, we first need to know the numbers of the first post on the 9th and the last post on the 11th. So we do a search for the period of interest:

SEARCH * IN opera-L FROM 97/02/09 TO 97/02/11

Since ours is a high-volume list, we get back the numbers for only the first 100 posts. But we now know from the results that the first post on the 9th is number 32813. Next we do a search for the last day:

SEARCH * IN opera-L FROM 97/02/11 TO 97/02/11

so I can see the number of the last post (which turns out to be 33049). Now I can order all the posts for just these three days:

GETPOST opera-L 32813-33049

which is a much smaller message than the LOG file for the whole week. Note the use of the asterisk in the searches (it stands for "everything") and the use of the hyphen in the GETPOST command to indicate a range of posts.


Frequently Asked Questions
--------------------------

Q. My results say there are more matches, but only the first 100 are listed. How do I list the others?

A. The new release of the search software gives you the neat "keyword in context" for the matches, but to keep file length, resource time, and your life manageable, there is a 100-match limit. Just send in your search again with a modified time frame (use SINCE or FROM... TO...).

Q. I send back the GETPOST line that LISTSERV suggests, but I get only some of the posts followed by an error message.

A. A GETPOST command can be no longer than one line. See How to order posts for a way around this.

Q. I'm searching for a set of isolated words. I get back an error message, but I can't figure out what's wrong -- everything looks OK.

A. Certain words like 'since' are reserved words that belong to the search language itself. Try putting each word in its own set of single quote marks. Some reserved words are: FROM, IN, SINCE, TO, UNTIL, WHERE, WITH, NEAR.

Q. I get back a list of matches, but no lines of "context".

A. You (logically) get no context back with the matches if you use the "everything" symbol (*) or if you have a search expression consisting of a single NOT phrase.

Q. I want all the posts sent by my friend, Mieze Maier, but I get nothing when I use

SEARCH * IN opera-L WHERE SENDER CONTAINS mieze.

A. SENDER is the e-mail address only. Her e-mail address may be, e.g., [log in to unmask] and may not contain "Mieze".

SEARCH * IN opera-L WHERE SENDER CONTAINS maier
would work in this case.

Q. The manual mentions that you can narrow matches from a search with a second search that omits the IN expression: the second search will be performed on the results of the first, as in:

SEARCH tosca OR butterfly IN opera-L
SEARCH summer

A. Don't believe everything you read. This was possible in earlier releases of the software, but does not appear to be true any longer. There is nothing you can do with this technique that you can't do in a single search. In this example, use

SEARCH (tosca OR butterfly) AND summer IN opera-L

Q. To see the messages posted on July 8, 1997, I sent the following:

SEARCH * IN opera-L from 97/07/08 to 97/07/08

Why are there breaks in item numbers in this GETPOST command that came back?

GETPOST OPERA-L 42710-42738 42740-42744 42746-42748

A. Breaks in the numeric sequence occur because the dates are based not upon when the list receives the message, but whatever the poster's e-mail software inserts. In this case, messages 42739 and 42745 were dated July 9. Similarly "errors" can occur when limiting by dates, because some people have configured their e-mail software incorrectly.

Q. When I do a search with * (everything), the list returned includes the item #, date and subject. Is there any way to list the sender also?

A. Unfortunately not at present. I was told that this may be included in a future release of the software.

Q. I've searched the archive high and low, front to back, but can't find the answers to my question.

A. You may have stumbled upon the Fundamental Question, to which there is no answer. Then again, you might try posting the list -- it's full of fundamentalists.


Enjoy the database and send me your comments about this tutorial.
Copyright 1997, 1998 Jared Weinberger
LISTSERV is a registered trademark licensed to L-Soft international, Inc.

Searching a LISTSERV list archive
The Search and Ye Shall Find Tutorial
<http://www.mindspring.com/~jaredmarkw/searchdoc.htm>