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Please make all checks payable to "Custom Services". Send all inquiries and warranty requests to: Custom Services P.O. Box 254 Moorestown, NJ 08057 FIND - A general purpose search utility: General Information: This program searches "header" lines in a user-defined file for any words that match any of the user specified arguments on the command line. The file searched by default is FIND.IDX . The user may specify any file. The file consists of two (2) type of lines. A Line with a character other than a space(or tab) in the first column is a header. Any line starting with a space(or tab) is data for the previous header. The file may be created as output from a user program or by using the editor supplied with your system. The words in the "header" line are separated by one or more blanks, each word is checked to see if it matches the requested search patterns. Program Options: FIND has several options which control the searches, where it will search and what it will do when it finds a match in the data. The options are as follows: (Note! A minimum of 1 Option is required.) -F which is used to input from a file other than the default file "FIND.IDX". The format is: Syntax: User supplies the filename. -F filename Example: Searches the sample file supplied on the disk. 1>FIND -F CATALOG.IDX Where filename may be any valid filename including device, directory and filename information. -S which will turn on the Soundex type searching option. This option will attempt to match slightly misspelled items which sound alike. If this option is not specified then only exact matches and wild card matches will be found. With this option you can search for an item finding partial matches. Syntax: Add -S to the command arguments. See example. Example: Searches the default file FIND.IDX using soundex method for searching. 1>FIND -S -V Which will print statistics at the end of the search. The run time and records scanned will be printed. Syntax: Add -V to the command arguments. See example. Example: Will search drive 0, the file CATALOG.IDX, using soundex methods and print statistical information. 1>FIND -F DF0:CATALOG.IDX -S -V -H This option will print only the header line for a matching entry. The data lines will not be printed for any matches. Syntax: Add -H to the command arguments. See example. Example: Searches the default file and outputs only the "header" line, data lines, if they exist, are ignored. 1>FIND -H -U Which if used will search comparing all characters as unique. If this option is not present characters are compared with all alphabetic characters converted to lower case. This option makes the search case sensitive. (ie. Mean is not a match if mean is found on the header line). SYNTAX: Add -U to command arguments. See example. EXAMPLE: Search the default file for exact character matches. 1>FIND -U XyzZy to search for XyzZy(will not find xyzzy) Search Options: There are two types of search arguments. The first type is one with wild card characters( "*" and/or "?") in the argument. This search argument will be matched to the strings in the file, with the matches printed. The wild card character "*" will match zero or more characters. The "?" will match exactly one character. The second type of search argument does not contain any wild card characters. This type will have to match either exactly to the strings in the file or match by having the same "SOUNDEX" value as the string in the file. This allows for slight misspelling to match. Some More Search Examples: Some examples are in order to clarify what you can do. If you wished to find all occurances of "Unix" and "Amiga" in the FIND.IDX file supplied with this program, you would use the command: 1>FIND -F CATALOG.IDX Unix Amiga All the lines in your file matching would be listed. Suppose you wanted to have the output go to a file called "SLIST". The command you would use would be: 1>FIND >SLIST -F CATALOG.IDX Unix Amiga If you wanted to match the strings "(anything)TON" you could use the command: 1>FIND -F *TON You might want to match "A" followed by any character then "B" then anything else. This would be done by: 1>FIND -F A?B* That would match AAB, ABB, and AxBxxxx where the x's could be any character. You might have a mailing list file (MAILING) and you want to find all the occurances of people with names starting with CUR, AB and RE. You only want the names(first line) and you would like some statistics on the search. A command to do this would b 1>FIND -H -V -F MAILING cur ab re Note that the upper or lower case may be used unless the -U option is used. You may use any combinations of valid options as long as the options appear before the search arguments. Options which are put after the first search argument will be treated as search arguments(yes, you can search for -U, -H, -V, -S or -F). Remember that search arguments without wild card characters are the only ones affected by the "-S" option. As you can see this is a very flexible program, limited only by your imagination.