Searching gentoo’s portage-trees with eix for more than one word

Edit:

You can, now ?, use multiple arguments of -S to achieve the same result so:

eix -S 'cd' -S 'writ'

works the same.
Thanks goes to Emil Beinroth for this hint.

All i wanted to do, was to search gentoo’s package descriptions for two words, quite after or nearby. How could i know that this proved to be so hard :)

After long research i found on a site a regexp doing more or less that what i wanted:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/near.html

Of course it malfunctioned, so i tried to adapt it to eix.

Here my results so far, help and improvement suggestions appreciated :):

So when i try for example to search for the words ‘cd’ and ‘writing’ i type:

eix -S 'cd(\W*\w*){9}writing|writing(\W*\w*){9}cd'

Spoken:

find the word ‘cd’, followed by some non-alphanumerics (or not), followed by some alphanumerics (or not) and repeat this alphanumerics – non-aphanumerics thingie for my sake 9 times before you search for the word ‘writing’ (so this match finds only to a maximum of 8 words between ‘cd’ and ‘writing’). Then reverse the two words and do the same sh…

Then try this same with ‘write’ or ‘writ’, there are at least 6 applications which don’t have the word ‘burn’ in their descriptions, it could be that easy :)

at least i have united k3b and xcdroast in one search result, so that all was not for nothing :)

Technorati Tags: eix, gentoo, regexp, regex, words, description

~ by princ3 on March 3, 2007.