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Re: APD history & text searches



> From: Michael Eckardt <mike at odg_com>
> 
> By now I have collected the APD since May last year and it gets harder and
> harder to find things. Do any of you know of or use a program that allows for
> searches through multiple files? How do you handle the APD back issues?

Since my workstation is an HP running Unix, I use the grep command to
create a subject/author index. I then use grep to look through that
index for a particular keyword in the subject. This only works if folks
use descriptive subjects on articles which is most of the time on
the interesting ones (not just questions). The alternative is to grep
through the entire archive but this can create voluminous output.
No big deal if you have multiple X windows in a GUI environment.
The problem is I have over 10 megabytes of data (starting at day one).
A lot of it is fairly repetitious; questions about lighting ;-).
Need to extract the important stuff (which I do for anything
obviously good) but there is too much to do that decently. A lot
of the value is just in reading the posts to get ideas. Having read
them all, I have little need to re-read but the articles on substrates 
and chemicals can be very technical.

Steve