Announcing the prerelease of the  AMMMAAAZZZINGG....... `agentsch'

There is a general stirring in the software dev community with this 
prerelease of the AMMMAZZZING first part of the ASSSTOUNDING:

`AgentHelperKit' suite 

This first precursor model, just one of a coming suite, is designed to
help `agent' users search the files they've accumulated under
News/agent.

Please send lots of money to my numbered Swiss Bank accounts.  I will
be publishing addresses throughout usenet for the next two weeks...


On the real side.....

If I don't get horse whipped or horse laughed off the list for posting 
an attachment and a non-lisp one at that.....

I hope someone finds this search tool useful.  I use it constantly
and find it to be very precise and useful.  Very unpolished of course
and has lots of things remaining to be done like some kind of basic
integration into nnir.

This tool was built under bash-2.04 and RedHat Linux 6.2. It may
break on other Machines and shells.

Hope it doesn't blow up and throw files on anyone.
Please send feedback if you do decide to try it out.

The output is formatted in what seems like a generally useful way
making it easy to retrieve messages if so desired.  A few stats are
printed at the end that will be of interest, including start and end
time.

`agentsch' is based on shell scripting and awk with the heavy work
being done by awk.  It is designed to search the numbered messages
under News/agent  or in `nnml' groups.

This tool requires 3 regexp to work and only returns hits if all three
are found in one message. Two are aimed at the headers and one at the
body.

Any users please read the documentation included.  
You can access it by typing `agentsch -H <RET>'

I tried to explain well as I could to make it easy to use.  Its a bit
clunky and uses a tmpfile to avoid the `too many command line args'
problem that arises when thousands of files are searched.  I had a
version that used `xargs' for that but that presented other problems
concerning `awks' use of BEGIN and END clauses.

There is a more sophisticated model underway that will handle up to 6
RE (3 head 3 body) and in any combination.  That will be a very exact
search tool.  No boolean fuzziness, just straight regular expression
searching.

This tool is not fast and relies on no database, but even against as
many as 60,000 messages it isn't all that slow either.

There are two ways to control where the search is directed.  The
obvious one is using the "-d" flag (required) to name the parent
directory searched.  But the tool will find numbered files at any
depth of nesting if you feed it a parent directory.

The other is to use `Xref:' in mail or `Newsgroups:' in news with the
"-t" flag that allows the user to set two custom regexp for the
headers.

To get full usage details type:

`agentsch -H' <RET>