Re: searching for text across subdirectories

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

I use se *.* /searchstring/ all the time. I put it on a macro key.

When I wanted to search a list of directories, I used a DOS batch file. I
can't find my file to show it to you, but I basically used the DOS FIND
command. I used a line for every directory with XyWrite files, and directed
the output into a temporary file. I entered a variable, and the batch file
would search all the directories. It worked very well, especially after I
upgraded to a Pentium, which reduced the search to a minute or two.

It's a little clunky, but it has the virtue of simplicity -- which for me
is a very important virtue.

I actually abandoned it after I got a couple of search programs. I used
ZyIndex, which was designed to work with XyWrite, and hides the formatting
codes -- it even formatted some of them correctly. Unfortunately, I
couldn't install ZyIndex under Win98, so I switched to dTSearch, which is a
shareware clone of ZyIndex. I actually spoke to David Thede, the author,
and prevailed on him to make it XyWrite-compatible. However, it's only
compatible if you use a consistent extension for every XyWrite file.

dTSearch works very well, and I think the shareware version is still
floating around on the Internet (and I should have some shareware disks
floating around in my storage boxes). The only problem is that it displays
the XyWrite formatting codes -- and doesn't seem to index the underlined
words properly. There may be a workaround for that, but I haven't spent
enough time playing with the advanced features.

I have 20 years of XyWrite files, including files of every story I've
written, with names, phone numbers, etc., and I regularly search them
several times a day with dTsearch. It's amazing for finding my notes on a
newspaper article I dimly remember. I think dTSearch will do what you want
-- with the caveat that I haven't tried it on WinXP yet.

As I mentioned before, I wrote a few stories on text searches, including
dTsearch and ZyIndex, which are on my web site.

On the 43-line window, there are several ways of changing the line length
in DOS. I use a batch file that calls a little program in the old DOS
Norton Utilities, but there are probably a hundred freeware utlities on the
Internet.

Norman


At 10:37 AM 9/19/03 -0400, Bill Troop wrote:
>
>I often use se *.* /searchstring/ in an empty window to find a text string
>across all files in the directory. But is there a way to do this that
>includes subdirectories? I'm sure it's included in the Jumbo utils. I also
>notice that in XP, SP 1, you can now tell the wretched XP search engine to
>search for all files, not merely those with extensions (or no extensions)
>that it recognizes. That has been extremely helpful.
>
>I have yet to find an external search text/indexing utility that seems to
>be really good. Everything I got off the net yesterday seemed to have some
>intractable problem. Not that I went very far with it after I learned that
>XP could be reconfigured.
>
>I also still have this problem with getting the DOS windows to be, let us
>say, 39 or 40 lines long, instead of the 43 lines that, as if by some
>stubborn alchemical custom, they insist on being. Weird!

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Norman Bauman
411 W. 54 St. Apt. 2D
New York, NY 10019
(212) 977-3223
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman
Alternate address: nbauman@xxxxxxxx
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