Archie

On almost any subject, there are many sources of information around the Internet. Unfortunately, sometimes finding the location of the information that you want can be difficult. Archie can help you find things related to your topic of interest.

Invoking Archie.

The general method of use is of the form

% archie string

This will query the archie server for all known systems that have a file named string in their FTP area. Archie will wait, and print out any matches. For example,

% archie emacs

will find all anonymous FTP sites in the archie database that have files named emacs somewhere in their FTP area. This example query would probably return many directories.

Archie Options.

If you want a list of files that contain emacs anywhere in the filename, you'd use the `c' option:

% archie -c emacs

The most important options are:

-c  Search substrings paying attention  to  upper  & lower case.
     -e  Exact string match.  (This is the default.)
     -r  Search using a regular expression.
     -s  Search  substrings  ignoring  the  case  of  the letters.
     -t  Sort the results inverted by date.

A regular expressions, such as,

% archie -r '[xX][lL]isp'

uses a matching template, in this case, matching xlisp, Xlisp, xLisp, and XLisp. If you list a single `-' by itself, any further arguments will be taken as part of the search string. This is intended to enable searching for strings that begin with a `-'.

For example: 

% archie -s - -old

will search for all filenames that contain the string `-old'.