http://www.geocities.com/janet313/pienet/tutorial/srch6.html
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Section 06: Search Tips:
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1. Keep your 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.
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2. Do not quote your search words unless you are looking for a string
of words that must be in order. When you do use quotes, use single
quotes: 'opera news', not "opera news".
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3. Use double quotes only when you need an exact capitalization match:
"BRAVO" will find "BRAVO", but not "Bravo" or "bravo".
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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
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5. There is an implicit NEAR between search words, so:
SEARCH tosca price IN PARKINSN
is the same as:
SEARCH tosca NEAR price IN PARKINSN
If you are content to have the words or strings anywhere in the
post, use AND:
SEARCH tosca AND price IN PARKINSN
If any of your criteria will suffice, use OR:
SEARCH 'four last songs' OR fls OR 'vier letzte lieder' IN PARKINSN
Note that as you add words with NEAR, as in:
SEARCH red green blue IN PARKINSN
or:
SEARCH red NEAR green NEAR blue IN PARKINSN
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.
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6. A convenient place to keep the "Search Examples Summary" in the
previous sections 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 wwweb-page.
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7. Long search lines: your e-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" [slash slash space] and end all but the last line with
" ," [space comma].
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 PARKINSN
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8. 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.
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9. The default operator for multiple-word searches in the subject line
is AND rather than NEAR:
SEARCH * IN PARKINSN WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS (atlanta tosca)
is the same as:
SEARCH * IN PARKINSN 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 PARKINSN WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS (atlanta NEAR tosca)
returns an error message.
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10. Catching up on missed mail: if you missed a number of days of posts
there are two ways to catch up via e-mail. The first way is to request
the relevant LOG file. Send listserv the message:
INDEX PARKINSN
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 my subscription had been set to NOMAIL, and I want to see all the
posts in 1997 from Feb 9th through the 11th, I would send the command:
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 PARKINSN 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 PARKINSN 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 PARKINSN 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.
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