6 ms·

Ask HN: Grep like tools for full text search?

9 points by joiguru 5y ago

Hello, Like many in this community, I maintain my notes in text files. I am looking for command line tools that I can use to index and search them. Are there existing tools that do that? My google skills are are not producing good results. Thanks

mindcrime 5y ago
You may get some mileage out of Swish-e[1]. And while it's not it's primary purpose, Lucene comes with some CLI programs[2]. They are there mainly as a demo, but if you feel like writing some code you might be able to adapt that to your needs. [1]: https://www.esa.org/tiee/search/html/readme.html https://www.esa.org/tiee/search/html/readme.html [2]: https://lucene.apache.org/core/3_5_0/demo.html https://lucene.apache.org/core/3_5_0/demo.html
bariumbitmap 5y ago
I use Recoll: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ There is a GUI, but it has a perfectly serviceable command-line interface as well. For example, this command lists all files with the exact phrase 'moved permanently': recoll -t -l '"moved permanently"' And this command finds all files ending in '.py' and under a directory called 'Dropbox' that contain the exact words "import" and "logging": recoll -t -l "ext:py dir:Dropbox/ Import Logging" It can take some time and effort to configure, but I have found it to be well worth it.
dunefox 5y ago
Ripgrep is good.
- masukomi 5y ago
  ripgrep is, great, but it's a regexp search not full text. Full text search includes stemming.
rightisleft 5y ago
I use this for searching through multi repo setups for code, it should be great for multiple text documents: AG: The Silver Searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
Noumenon72 5y ago
Why not grep? Are you saying you want full text search with like, stemming and result ranking? If I can piggyback on your question, my notes are in Word files and I sure wish I could grep those. I bet none of the answers at https://superuser.com/questions/70343/grep-in-microsoft-word https://superuser.com/questions/70343/grep-in-microsoft-word work any more because Microsoft will keep changing the file format.
- joiguru 5y ago
  Because grep is not a "full text search tool". Full text search [1] is different from regular expression search. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_search
motyar 5y ago
You search inside file using grep. grep -Ril "term"