Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!hao!gatech!uflorida!codas!cpsc6a!rtech!llama!sid
From: sid@llama.rtech.UUCP (Sid Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: online notebook requested
Keywords: Notekeeping
Message-ID: <1657@rtech.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jan 88 23:26:16 GMT
References: <3600005@hpiacla.HP.COM> <239@cfpas.UUCP>
Sender: news@rtech.UUCP
Reply-To: sid@llama.UUCP (Sid Shapiro)
Organization: Relational Technology, Inc. Alameda, CA
Lines: 29

In article <239@cfpas.UUCP> jhritz@cfpas.UUCP (John Hritz) writes:
>In article <3600005@hpiacla.HP.COM> marki@hpiacla.HP.COM (Mark Ikemoto) writes:
>>I am looking for a tool.  Please read on... 
>>
>>During my continuing learning process with Unix I have come across
>>bits of information about Unix that I would have liked to have stored
>>away, on-line, in my own personal data base/notebook for later recall.
>>
>I had the same need, which I addressed at first with a mail style interface and
>then with a program which inserts time and date along with the little snipet.
>Your idea with keywords and things would also be helpful.  Sed would allow the
>keyword seach as well as a mark to mark extraction using the append option.
>I will play around with the idea and report back.

I once implemented a scheme that I got from an idea that some guy at
Lucas Films described.  Take a file, stash it in a safe place (or
message of some kind) with a name derived from the date, strip out all
non-essential words, and enter the rest of the words in a DBM data base
keyed to the rest of the words, with the rest of the fields containing
the names of all the files that that word appeared in.  The end result
was a key-word data base, but rather than have to figure out the key
words (something I always had trouble with) almost every word was keyed!
It was implemented as a bourne shell script.  There were 2 problems with
it though: first it was REAL slow.  I expect if I had re-done it in c it would
have speeded up.  Second - I didn't know how to delete a file without
rebuilding the entire data base - something that took forever. 

It was fun though.
/ Sid /