We use glimpse as the search engine and an own CGI script for the interface. Glimpse supports many special characters in the search pattern, like regular expressions, wildcards, and boolean operators. What follows is a short overview of the most important metacharacters. Please consult the manual of glimpse for a detailed explanation of all available metacharacters.
Strings are any sequence of characters. The following special characters should be preceeded by a backslash (\) if they are to be matched as regular characters: $, ^, *, [, ], ^, |, (, ), !, \, ;, #, <, >, -, ., and ,. You can also turn off interpretation of special characters completely.
A list of characters in brackets ([]) corresponds to any character from the list. For example, [a-ho-z] is any character between »a« and »h« or between »o« and »z«. The caret (^) following an opening bracket complements the list. For example, [^a-z] denote any character in the character set except lower-case characters (»a« to »z«).
Glimpse supports an `AND' operation denoted by the symbol `;' an `OR' operation denoted by the symbol `,', or any combination. For example, pattern1;pattern2 will output all lines containing both patterns.
The hash sign (#) is used to denote a sequence of any number (including 0) of arbitrary characters. The symbol '#' is equivalent to `.*' in regular expressions. For example, ^abc#def$ will find all lines beginning with the string »abc« and ending with »def«.
Since the search index is word based, a regular expression must match words that appear in the index for glimpse to find it. Glimpse first strips the regular expression from all non-alphabetic characters, and searches the index for all remaining words. For example, abc.*def causes glimpse to search the index for files that contain both, »abc« and »def«, and then search directly for 'abc.*def' in those files. The syntax of regular expressions in glimpse is in general the same as that for the Unix utility agrep with the exception, that the operator '+' is not supported.
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