Re: searching

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Francisco Solsona <solsona@deprof.fciencias.unam.mx> writes:

> Phil Humpherys <phumpherys@utah-inter.net> writes:
> 
> > I'm interesting in useful searcing of mail groups.  Suppose I
> > have a rather large mail group, and I'd like to search through
> > the bodies of the email messages and get a summary window of the
> > results?  Or say I want to get a summary of all the email my
> > friend Craig has ever sent...  are there cool ways to do this?
> 
> 	I'm using kai's nnir, and it does precisely what you want. You 
> need Wais or glimpse, and you can't restrict it to just one group (not 
> yet), though.
> 
> 	You can find it at:
> 
> ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/emacs 
> 
Kai's nnir is very nice but awfully slow if your only wanting to
search one group.  It will be really an advance for nnir to get the
'glimpse' -F flag as an option on the gnus prompt (would allow aiming
nnir at 1 or 10 or any number of groups by regexp against the path
name.

For now if you are searching one group, Gnus has built in functioning
that does a very nice job.  Finds all the hits and  assembles them in
a buffer for your perusal.

Here's how:

In the summary buffer press '&'  -- When prompted for the "header"
type 'body'  When prompted for a search string put in your query ( a
regexp can be just a word or name)
You will then be prompted for the command you wish to run on the hits.
Type `#' 
Gnus will tear through the group finding all messages containing your
search string and apply a `#' to them.  When this activity is over you
can press `/ n' to limit the view to those messages with the `#' on
them.

Quite a nice search tool.

I think you can do this to more than one group by putting several
groups in a `virtual group' and following the same sequence. 

-- 

Harry Putnam  reader@newsguy.com