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the search and ye shall find tutorial
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valid date formats
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15 october 95
either a two-digit or a four-digit year can be used:
e.g. 95 or 1995
october 95
if a month is used without a day,
the entire month is included in the search
oct 95
any unambiguous month abbreviation is valid:
d 95 is valid, ju 95 is not
15 Oct 95
capitalization is not important
oct
if the year is omitted, the current year is assumed
95/10/15
with slashes, a year/month/day format is obligatory;
two-digit year only
95-10-15
with hyphens, a year-month-day format is obligatory;
two-digit year only
7/21
with slash, a month/day format is obligatory:
since the year is omitted, the current year is assumed
7-21
with hyphen, a month-day format is obligatory:
since the year is omitted, the current year is assumed
today
the day of the search:
convenient for relative searching.
today-20
NumberOfDays back (20 in this case) from the day of the search;
no space before or after the minus sign
yesterday
the day before the day of the search:
convenient for relative searching.
yesterday-30
NumberOfDays back (30 in this case) from the day before the search:
no space before or after the minus sign
an example of a time expression:
FROM yesterday-30 TO yesterday-15
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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.
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 Do not quote your search words unless you are looking for a string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".
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' 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 "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 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" [slash slash space] and end each 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 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: 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
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.
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how to request copies of messages
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After you have sent in your search command message, LISTSERV will send
you back the results of your search (assuming you keep reading and learn
how to do one).
You will see a list of the archived posts meeting your criteria, with
their item # and subject header descriptions, plus a bit of context
showing the match. You can then request the full post(s) by sending a
GETPOST command to LISTSERV:
GETPOST PARKINSN 4362 24605 1964
Note that you have to give the list name, there are no # signs or
commas in this line, and posts do not have to be in numerical order.
Each non-empty search comes back to you with a GETPOST line ready to
edit and send, BUT a long string of post numbers will be truncated,
and you will receive only some of the posts followed by an "Unknown
command" message.
Two solutions:
(1) break it up into separate lines, each starting with GETPOST
(the posts will arrive in separate e-mail messages from LISTSERV,
one per GETPOST command).
viz:
GETPOST PARKINSN 1964 4362 4381 4458 12172 22496 24605 25905
GETPOST PARKINSN 30905 32709 34739 36577 37978
(2) start the first line with "// " (slash, slash, space)
and end each BUT the last line with " ," (space comma)
viz:
// GETPOST PARKINSN 1964 4362 4381 4458 12172 22496 27145 ,
30905 32709 34739 36577 37978 41212 4381 4458 12172 ,
4362 4381 4458 12172 22496 27145
You can also specify ranges, viz:
GETPOST PARKINSN 840 859 19464-19472
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frequently asked questions
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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.
Adapted from
The Search-and-Ye-Shall-Find Tutorial
1997, 1998 Jared Weinberger
Last update: Sept. 9, 1998
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updated
1999/09/24
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janet paterson
52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset
613 256 8340 po box 171 almonte ontario canada K0A 1A0
a new voice: <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/6263/>
<[log in to unmask]>
