From: Eric L. Strobel (fyzycyst_at_comcast.net)
Date: Thu Jan 30 2003 - 09:38:56 PST
on 1/30/03 12:23 PM, Jim Anderson at jiman_at_microsoft.com wrote:
> Eric wrote:
>> Actually, I've found the 'man' pages quite helpful -- IF you=20
>> know what command you need! If you don't know the name of=20
>> the command that you need to learn about, then 'man' is=20
>> (obviously) useless. Admittedly, the last time I did Unix=20
>> was on a Silly-G about 5 years ago, so maybe documentation=20
>> has advanced, but I always thought 'man' needed a good topical index.
>
> That's what the "apropos" command is for. If you want to find
> out something about (say) any coffee-related commands, you'd run
> "apropos coffee", and it would come back with a list of man pages that
> deal with coffee. Granted, it doesn't do any sort of analysis to figure
> out what is more or less topical...
Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about 'apropos', mostly because of too many cases
where either the signal/noise was way too low on what it gave back, OR those
cases where it completely missed something (that I'd later have pointed out
to me by some Unix guru). 'apropos' always seemed most useful if you sort
of knew what you needed -- like when a kid asks how to spell a word and you
tell them to look it up in a dictionary. If you know the first part, then
you can get close enough to do a quick scan and find it. Similarly, I
always found 'apropos' worked best if you knew a little, then it would get
you close enough.
But it just occurred to me that one ought to be able to use something like
one of the smarter search engines to do better search, with relevance
rankings. The question is, is there a decent search engine to install & use
on one's HD in this fashion?
- Eric.
-- Eric Strobel (fyzycyst_at_NOSPAM^mailaps.org) ===================================================================== I like animals. They taste good! ===================================================================== -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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