Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!killer!wnp
From: wnp@killer.UUCP (Wolf Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: online notebook requested
Summary: Something like this was posted to comp.unix.microport
Message-ID: <2940@killer.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jan 88 14:23:48 GMT
References: <3600005@hpiacla.HP.COM>
Reply-To: wnp@killer.UUCP (Wolf Paul)
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection BBS, Dallas, Tx
Lines: 35

In article <3600005@hpiacla.HP.COM> marki@hpiacla.HP.COM (Mark Ikemoto) writes:
>I am looking for a tool.  Please read on... 
>
>Basically, it's like the grep command searching a file for keywords,
>but instead of returning just one line per match, it returns 
>several lines until some marker is reached.  One nice thing is that
>you could set up  man2  to access the notebooks of other users (willing
>users!) on your system or other systems.  Kind of a distributed
>intelligence with random thoughts.
>
>I've thought of this tool but haven't had the time to implement it yet.
>Does anyone out there have it, its equivalent, or something better
>(hopefully for free).
>

A program like this is included with the MKS Toolkit, and my attempt to
re-write it for UNIX (since I don't have MKS source :-)) was recently posted
to comp.unix.microport.

The program is called "help" (very original :-)) and uses a helpfile where
each entry starts with a line consisting of '#' and one or more keywords.
The program looks for a match of argv[1] with one of the keywords, and then
outputs everything from the line following the '#' to the last line before the
next '#' line.

The program uses an index file which contains the absolute file offset in the 
helpfile for each keyword. I don't know if and how much this improves
performance, or if it is efficiently implemented.

If you cannot find the program in comp.unix.microport, e-mail me and I will
send you a shar file - the thing is not that long. If there is enough interest,
I will post it to comp.sources.misc as well.

Wolf Paul
ihnp4!killer!wnp