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.TH REL 1 "September 13, 1996"
.SH NAME
rel \- order the relevance of text documents to a search criteria
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
rel [options] patterns paths ...
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
Rel
is a program that determines the relevance of text documents to a set
of keywords expressed in boolean infix notation. The list of file
names that are relevant are printed to the standard output, in order
of relevance. The boolean operators supported are logical or, logical
and, and logical not. These operators are represented by the symbols,
"|", "&", and, "!", respectively, and left and right parenthesis, "("
and ")", are used as the grouping operators. The paths can be files
and/or directories-if it is a directory, the program will recursively
descend into the directory, searching all files and directories
contained in the directory.
For example, the command:
rel "(directory & listing)" /usr/share/man/cat1
(ie., find the order of relevance of all files that contain both of
the words "directory" and "listing" in the catman directory) will list
a few tens of files, out of the hundreds of catman files, of which
"ls.1" is the among the most relevant-meaning that to find the command
that lists directories in a Unix system, the "literature search" was
reduced, on average, by about 98%, which is a considerable expediency
in relation to browsing through the files in the directory. Although
this example is remedial, a similar expediency can be demonstrated in
searching for documents in email repositories and text archives.
Additional applications include information robots, (ie., "mailbots,"
or "infobots,") where the disposition (ie., delivery, filing, or
viewing,) of text documents can be determined dynamically, based on
the relevance of the document to a set of criteria, framed in boolean
infix notation. Or, in other words, the program can be used to order,
or rank, text documents based on a "context," specified in a general
mathematical language, similar to that used in calculators.
The words in the query are case insensitive, and either upper or lower
case can be used.
Associativity of operators is left to right, and the precedence of
operators is identical to 'C':
precedence operator
high ! = not
middle & = and
lowest | = or
The operator symbols can be escaped with the "\\" character to include
the symbol in a search pattern. The "escape space" character sequence
represents one or more instances of space character(s) in search
patterns, and each instance will match one or more consecutive
whitespace characters, (as defined by isspace(3) in ctype.h and/or
locale.h,) and allows phrases to be searched for. The "many to one"
whitespace character translation occurs in both the keyword arguments
and the text document(s). Multiple consecutive instances of the
"escape space" character sequence in keyword search phrases should not
be used, and single instances are appropriate only when necessary to
specify a consecutive sequence of keywords-the logical and operator is
the preferred searching construct when searching documents that
contain set(s) of keywords.
Hyphenation issues are addressed by deleting hyphens and any following
sequence of instances of whitespace characters, (as defined by
isspace(3),) in both the keyword arguments and the text document(s).
Backspace character issues are addressed by overwriting the character
before the backspace with the character after the backspace, which
will instantiate the character of the last instance of of consecutive
backspace/character combinations. This is specifically for catman
pages which utilize underscore/backspace/character combinations for
underlining, in addition to backspace/character combinations for bold
(overstrike,) representation-note that for this process to be
successful, a single underscore (used for underlining,) must preceed a
single character in the sequence.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B -v
Print the version and copyright banner of the program.
.SH WARNINGS
.PP
In the interest of performance, Memory is allocated to hold the entire
file to be searched. Large files may create resource issues.
.PP
The "not" boolean operator, '!', can NOT be used to find the list of
documents that do NOT contain a keyword or phrase, (unless used in
conjunction with a preceeding boolean construct that will
syntactically define an intermediate accept criteria for the documents.)
The rationale is that the relevance of a set of documents that do NOT
contain a phrase or keyword is ambiguous, and has no meaning-ie., how
can documents be ordered that do not contain something? Whether this is
a bug, or not, depends on one's point of view.
.SH SEE ALSO
.PP
egrep(1), agrep(1)
.SH DIAGNOSTICS
.PP
Error messages for illegal or incompatible search patterns, for
non-regular, missing or inaccessible files and directories, or for
(unlikely) memory allocation failure, and signal errors.
.SH AUTHORS
.nf
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A license is hereby granted to reproduce this software source code and
to create executable versions from this source code for personal,
non-commercial use. The copyright notice included with the software
must be maintained in all copies produced.
THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED "AS IS". THE AUTHOR PROVIDES NO WARRANTIES
WHATSOEVER, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE
AUTHOR DOES NOT WARRANT THAT USE OF THIS PROGRAM DOES NOT INFRINGE THE
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS OF ANY THIRD PARTY IN ANY COUNTRY.
Copyright (c) 1995, 1996, John Conover, All Rights Reserved.
Comments and/or bug reports should be addressed to:
john@johncon.com (John Conover)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
.fi
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