How to use the cool blinux-list search capabilities.

How to use the cool blinux-list search capabilities.

[Hans Zoebelein]

Hi blinux-subscriber,

if you want to find out how to install/handle/run some piece of
software/hardware you can post a message to blinux-list and hope
for a (usually) fast answer from the list. 

Or you can use the cool search tools of blinux-list to get all messages,
which deal with a special topic. Why might this preferable to a fresh
posting to the list? You'll get all postings about this theme which might 
be the complete answer to your questions. You'll get it (nearly) at once.
People on the list don't have to answer the same easy questions again and
again.

How to use the search facility of blinux-list?
When you subscribed to blinux-list, you got some help files, which
describe how to handle the search tools. Perhaps you didn't save it and
want it again? Send an email message to blinux-list-request@redhat.com 
with subject line: "archive help" and you'll get the archive help file
again.

How to handle an archive search?

You send your requests always to blinux-list-request@redhat.com. This is
the address to handle administration stuff and requests. Postings to this 
address will not shine up to other users through blinux-list.

You can do a full text search of words in old postings. This is done
through the command 'egrep'. You can also use the commands `grep`,
'fgrep', 'search' or 'find'. 

To search for the word 'lilo' in old blinux postings you send an email
to blinux-list-request@redhat.com. You use a subject line:
grep lilo latest/*. 

Why do we a `grep lilo latest/*' and not a 'grep lilo *', you may ask.
Thats because the old blinux postings are all stored in the 'latest'
subdirectory.

What do we get back after sending our request? The posting we get looks
like that:

latest/101:14:at the time the lilo-prompt came up. Now I have a pentium 
latest/101:16:tell if it is possible to let lilo beep when it prompts.
latest/103:25:application.  Lilo, the Linux Loader, allows one to select
latest/106:35:In any case, Lilo and Milo utilities should be extended to
latest/110:27:> at the time the lilo-prompt came up. Now I have a pentium
latest/110:29:> tell if it is possible to let lilo beep when it prompts.
latest/110:32:me, he has a `message=' line in /etc/lilo.conf, pointing to
latest/114:26:This doesn't do LILO much good, though, nor Linux in
latest/114:27:LILO is loading, it can't do _anything_. Hoping the BIOS
[other 168 lines omitted]

Wow! We get more than 170 pointers to postings which contained the word
'lilo' and thats a good chance, that our problem was resolved in one of
these  postings.  

Now we want to get files which look good. Sow e send an email to
blinux-list-request@redhat.com. We use the subject line: archive
to tell the list server, that we want to do something with the archive.
Now we write the lines: 

get latest/101
get latest/103
get latest/106 

into the body of the email and the list server will send us these
three files. So check out the search tool. It can be real useful to find what you want
to know.


Enjoy!
Hans