I search the list archives reasonably frequently, so was surprised that
people consider them unsearchable. If people are worried it's hard or
unwieldy, here's some tips for Windows, Unix and MacOS. These involve
downloading the archives (search hyperreal if you don't know the URL!) to
your machine, but you only have to do that once.
In Windows, make a folder called "IDM". Extract gzipped archives to
separate subfolders within it. People's attachments fuck things up for
Winzip a lot, but once you've done it, you never need to do it again. Slap
all the more recent archives, which aren't compressed into the basic "IDM"
folder. When I want to find something I click with the right mouse button
on this folder, choose the option "Find" and use the option of searching
for files containing the text I want. If I get hits in the recent archives,
where each whole month is a single file, I open that file using Wordpad and
cntl-f to find the relevant part of the file. Sweet.
In Unix, do a similar thing, using gunzip to unzip the gzipped archives. I
was searching for eg. Fibla, I'd change into the IDM directory and do
something like the following:
find . -type f -exec grep -i fibla {} \; -print
"-print" just because I'm forever paranoid the results aren't going to
reach stdout. I'd probably pipe the above through less... I guess you could
pipe it through subsequent greps, but you'd lose which file each hit is in.
I've found searching while lessing is easier.
If I had the files on a Mac, I'd extract all files similarly (trying
Stuffit expander or something) then use Sherlock to search on contents
rather than file name.
I hope people find these useful. This post is meant to show that searching
the archives is easy and not a big deal, so apologies if I've geeked anyone
out or made things looks hard. :-) I'm sure a thousand people could one up
me on ways to do this, anyway, judging by all the people doing code and
stuff out there.
Michael
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