Re: 'apt-cache search' question

[ronin2@bellatlantic.net]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003 02:20:21 +0000 (UTC)
Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu> wrote:

> > the gimp. Using 'apt-cache search gimp gif' did not return the
> > correct answer. The man page for apt-cache says:
> > 
> > search search  performs  a  full  text  search on all available
> > package
> > 	  files for the regex pattern given. It searchs the package 
> > 	  names and  the  descriptions for an occurance of the string
> > 	  and 

I'm pretty sure it already does what the man page says it does. When I
use apt-cache search sometimes I get a whole lot of stuff that isn't
what I'm looking for, because of the package description search.

I think the problem is that in the command line
 apt-cache search gimp gif

the phrase "gimp gif" is not a regular expression. What happened here is
that apt-cache searched for the pattern "gimp" and stopped after it saw
the space. It didn't even see "gif".

Regular expressions is a highly detailed technical topic, which I
couldn't begin to describe in a mail message. If you can find the
O'Reilly book "Mastering Regular Expressions" you'll find it to be 
excellent. I don't know any others, but that doesn't mean they don't
exist.

Don't embarrass yourselves by filing a bug on this. :)

Kevin