SEFT(1) (1999/10/22) SEFT(1)
NAME
seft - a search engine for text
SYNOPSIS
seft [ options ] "query terms" textfiles
DESCRIPTION
Seft takes a set of query terms and a set of files as argu-
ments and, using a locality-based similarity heuristic,
determines word locations within the files that are of
interest with respect to the query. The user is then pre-
sented with a sequence of windows of text, the first window
surrounding the most relevant location, the second window
surrounding the next most relevant location and so on. Both
the number of windows presented and the size of the window
can be specified as parameters to seft. In addition, the
user can specify whether to apply case-folding and/or stem-
ming to the query terms and the text files.
OPTIONS
-h This displays a usage line on stderr.
-f query-file File containing query terms.
-n Supress output.
-m max-windows
Specifies the maximum number of windows to
display (default = 5).
-p Print a formfeed character after every window.
Useful when piping output through a pager such
as more.
-s [0|1|2] Casefolding and stemming. 0 turns casefolding
off and stemming off. 1 turns casefolding on
and stemming off. 2 turns casefolding on and
stemming on (default = 2).
-w window-size
Specifies the number of lines within a window
(default = 3).
-x Turns off high-lighting of query term loca-
tions.
USAGE
Consider that the text file Query has the contents "computer
industry" then the following seft examples have the same
SEFT(1) (1999/10/22) SEFT(1)
meaning:
seft -f Query ~oldk/News/*
seft "computer industry" ~oldk/News/*
These commands would have the effect of searching through a
users News folder for articles relating to "computer" and
"industry", and returning windows of text surrounding the
most relevent locations of text.
NOTE
If highly ranked query locations lie in close proximity,
then it is likely that seft would display either windows
which contain the same contents (the highly ranked query
terms exist on the same line) or windows which partially
overlap. To avoid this, the current version of seft does
not display windows whose centre line has already been dis-
played (anywhere) within a previous window.
SEE ALSO
grep(1), agrep(1), egrep(1), fgrep(1), more(1), mg(1)