dejasearch(1)

Usage

dejasearch [options] query_string

Overview

DejaSearch is a frontend to Deja.com (http://www.deja.com/), the leading Usenet archive and search engine. Deja.com is a great resource to uncover even the most obscure information from the sea of data that is Usenet. I frequently use it to find answers to technical problems, or to learn about how people rate particular products before making a more informed purchase.

DejaSearch will submit a search for you to Deja.com, then retrieve and consolidate all search results into one single HTML file, sorted in newsgroup, subject and date (reverse) order. This means related messages will be closer to one another, with the more recent messages nearer to the top. This also means you can print out the entire file and read the messages at your leisure, instead of having to go through them one by one on the screen.

Options

-format new|classic|mbox: Interface to use (default: new).

-fromdate date: Date to limit search from (eg. Apr+1+1997)).

-todate date: Date to limit search to (eg. Apr+8+1997)).

-max num: Maximum number of messages to retrieve
(default: 99,999).

-nostatus: Opposite of -status.

-noverbose: Opposite of -verbose.

-output filename: Name of output file (default: summary.html).

-proxy URL: Proxy server in http://hostname:port format.
Overrides the http_proxy environment variable.

-sleep num: Wait num seconds between requests, to avoid being tagged as a robot.

-status: Display download status (default: true).

-type recent|past|all: Archive to use (default: all).

-verbose: Display search status (default: true).

Deja.com search language quick reference

The query string is made of keywords mixed with the following special characters:

Op Description Example
& Logical and "beans & rice"
| Logical or "camel | llama"
&! Logical and-not "clam &! chowder"
^ Near "steven ^ spielberg"
"" Quote marks "the far side"
* Match any string "psych*"
? Match any character "gr?y"
[] Match c. in set/range "gr[ae]y"
() Grouping "scully & (xfiles | x-files)"
{} Match any string between bounds "{monkey monkeying}"
~a Author "~a [email protected]"
~s Subject "~s chess"
~g Newsgroup "~g alt.love"
~dc Creation date "~dc 1996/12/31"

AND, OR, AND NOT and NEAR are synonymous with &, |, &! and ^ respectively.

Examples

dejasearch linux ip masquerading ppp: This will search for all messages containing "linux", "ip", "masquerading" and "ppp" and output all messages to "summary.html".

dejasearch "linux [ip masquerading] ppp": This will search for all messages containing "linux", "ip masquerading" and "ppp" and output all messages to "summary.html". Since I don't know of any method to pass double quotes to the shell (I use tcsh), I chose [ and ] as an alias for specifying a phrase.

dejasearch "linux & (ip ^ masquerading) & ppp": This will search for all messages containing "linux", "ip" and "masquerading" close to one another and "ppp" and output all messages to "summary.html".

dejasearch -max 50 -output results.html linux ip masquerading ppp: This will search for up to 50 messages containing "linux", "ip", "masquerading" and "ppp" and output all messages to "results.html".

Files

~/.dejasearchrc: Proxy authentication information, in "username:password" format (on a single line and without the quotes). The mode of this file must be 400 or 600, or DejaSearch aborts with a non-zero status.

Environment

http_proxy: HTTP proxy to use, in "http://hostname:port" format (without the quotes).

Exit status

0 OK.
255 An error occurred.