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1997-05-12
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________________________________________________________________________
Program Name: NewsFind
Purpose: Newsbase search engine
Author: Tony Houghton
Version: 2.20 (11 April 1997)
________________________________________________________________________
Contact details:
Tony Houghton
271 Upper Weston Lane
Woolston
Southampton
SO19 9HY
mailto:tonyh@tcp.co.uk
URL:http://www.tcp.co.uk/~tonyh/
________________________________________________________________________
NewsFind is an 'applet' for searching for patterns in messages stored by
Newsbase. Matching articles are copied to a folder so that they can be
read by a newsreader such as TTFN or Messenger. NewsFind makes use of
overview files to speed up searching, so you need to use Newsbase 0.55
or later and ensure that this feature is switched on.
When you choose a group to search you can either pick it from the menu
or type it. You can also type a hierarchy, using a trailing *, eg
"comp.sys.acorn.*" to search all the groups within Newsbase beginning
with comp.sys.acorn.
You can either confine a search to the contents of a specific header in
each article, search all the headers, or search the article body,
including or excluding headers. The range of headers available for
specific headers is restricted to those consistently available in
overview files, for speed of searching. Note that for mail groups the
In-Reply-To header takes the place of References.
A '#' character in the search expression matches any one character, and
a '*' matches 0 or more. The end condition of a *-wildcard is either the
end of a line (if the * is at the end of the expression) or the sequence
that matches what follows the * in the expression. You can search for *
or # characters specifically contained in messages by escaping them in
the expression with a backslash ('\').
Messages are searched on a line by line basis, and the default option is
now to search for a pattern anywhere in a line. This is in contrast with
the old behaviour, where the entire line must match the expression. This
mode can be enabled by selecting the "Strict line match" option.
The "Newest first" option allows you to search each group in reverse
order so that the newest messages are scanned first.
There is now an option to delete matching articles. I don't really need
to warn you to be very careful with this option, although as the
articles are also copied to the folder, mistakes aren't entirely
catastrophic - you'll just have a difficult job putting them back where
they belong.
The Choices dialogue box allows you to choose a folder to copy matching
articles to, set a log file where brief details of each search are
written, and to set a user. Setting a user allows that user's email to
be searched. NewsFind does not support passwords.
NewsFind stores its choices file as
"<NewsFind$ChoicesDir>.NewsFind.Choices", creating the NewsFind
subdirectory for itself if necessary. The !Run file sets this variable
either to within a Risc PC's boot structure or to within !NewsDir, but it
can obviously be customised if necessary.
When saving the Choices, NewsFind will also save all the settings from the
most recent search, except for the expression.
If a Choices file is not present NewsFind will choose defaults.
NewsFind 2 can also be used as a transient application launched from an
external task such as a newsreader. See the file !NewsFind.ExtLaunch for
details.