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Controlling the Depth of Search
The findme command allows you to find information at
the level of detail you want by searching any of four categories of
information associated with hypertext
documents:
- The document name (-n
switch)
This is given by the name of the
directory that contains the
document.
For example, the name of the document you are reading now is
"sun188" because its hypertext version resides in
a directory called "sun188.htx". The name of a document may
indicate what category of information it contains and is very quick
and easy to search.
- The document title (-t
switch)
This is extracted from the "top" HTML
page of a document
and consists of the text that appears between the <TITLE> and
</TITLE> tags in the HTML header section for that page. The
title of a document is obviously a good place to search for important
topics and this can be done quite quickly.
- The document's page headings (-h
switch)
These are extracted in the same way as the document
title (above), but from all the other HTML pages in the document,
excluding the "top" page. If you have
converted your document from a
format such as LaTeX, then these will be the section headings
that appear in the printed form of the document. This is normally a
fruitful place to search for slightly more specialised topics and can
be done without a serious time penalty because HTX
caches this information in a document's index
file.
- The lines of text in the document (-l switch)
These consist of the contents of all the HTML files in the document
(including all their HTML tags, URLs,
etc). This is the ultimate place to search for information, but
this can take quite a while if the documentation set is large.
If none of the switches shown above is used when findme is
invoked, its default action is to:
- Search the document titles
- If that fails to find a match, search the page headings
- If that fails to find a match, search the lines of text
However, if one or more of the -n, -t, -h or -l
switches is used, then only the specified categories of
information will be searched, and this will be done in a single pass
through all the documents. For instance:
findme -n sun
will cause only the document names to be searched (for the string
"sun"), while:
findme -t sun
would search only the document titles, and:
findme -t -h sun
would search both the titles and page headings in a single pass.

Next: Searching Specific Documents
Up: SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION IN DOCUMENTS
Previous: Performing Keyword Searches
HTX Hypertext Cross-Reference Utilities
Starlink User Note 188
R.F. Warren-Smith
6th January 1998
E-mail:rfws@star.rl.ac.uk