RE: 'apt-cache search' question

["Joyce, Matthew" <MJoyce@ccia.org.au>]

> 
> > > 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
> 
> 

That's not how I understood it.

>From the man page.
"Seperate arguments can be used to specified multi­ple search patterns that
are and'd together."

'apt-cache search server' and 'apt-cache search server ftp' produce quite
different amounts of hits, the space does not 'stop' it.


Matt


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