DEJASEARCH(1)

NAME
dejasearch - A front-end to the deja.com Usenet search engine

SYNOPSIS
dejasearch [options] query_string

DESCRIPTION
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

-author name
    Author (could be partial name) to limit search to (eg. @my-deja.com)

-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 demos@deja.com"
~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.

BUGS
See README.

AUTHOR
Chew Wei Yih, Victor <vchew@post1.com>
Steffen Ullrich <coyote.frank@gmx.net>
Frank de Lange <frank@unternet.org>
J.R. Tietsort <jrtietsort@micron.com>

Contributor: André Majorel <amajorel@teaser.fr>

Homepage: http://homemade.hypermart.net/dejasearch/