This help file explains in moderate detail what each field in the search page means. If you still can't locate the help you need or you want to report an error please mail us at archie-group@bunyip.com and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Here you type in the search variable. If regular expression is the type of search you are using then the string would be the regular expression you are looking for.

The database which will be undergoing the search. If you are searching the web then press on the Web Index button. Otherwise if you are searching the FTP sites then press on the other button.

• Exact:
• Sub String:
  Substring (case insensitive): A match occurs if the file (or directory) name in the database contains the user-given substring, without regard to case.

  Example:
  
                 The pattern:
                      is
  
                 matches any of the following:
  
                      islington
                      this
                      poison
  
  

  Substring (case sensitive): As above, but taking case as significant.

  Example:
  
                 The pattern:
  
                      TeX
  
                 will match:
  
                      LaTeX
  
                 but neither of the following:
  
                      Latex
                      TExTroff
  

• Regular Expression: Regular expressions follow the conventions of the ed(1) command, allowing sophisticated pattern matching. Regular expressions imbue certain characters with special meaning, providing a quoting mechanism to remove this special meaning when required.

This option only affects searches of type Regular Expression and Substring.

This controls the output format for results from the Web Index database.

• Keywords Only: The most frequently occurring Keywords in each document will be displayed after the document's URL.
• Excerpts Only: A short excerpt from each document is displayed after its URL.
• Links Only: Only links are displayed with no further details. No excerpts or Keywords are displayed with each URL.

Optional Parameters

• Path restriction or exclusion: Several parameters could be used to improve your search results. But first you must specify what type of operation to be used on those upcoming fields. If you specify OR then you ask that the strings you provide in these fields have an OR relationship among them. Otherwise if you specify AND then you are asking for all the strings that you provide in these fields to be considered.
  • Path Restriction : You can improve the results by restricting on the path of each URL that comes back. The strings you provide in these field will be matched against the paths returned in the result and paths that do not contain these strings will be disregarded. If you have chosen the OR as your operator among the strings then if any of the strings occur in a path this path will be considered valid. However if you have chosen AND as your operator then unless all the entered strings appear in the path, the path is invalid.
  • Path Exclusion : You can exclude certain results from coming back if they contain a specific string you don't need to see. By specifying this string in this field you will achieve your goal.
• Domains: This variable allows you to restrict the scope of your search based upon the Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) of the anonymous FTP or Web sites being searched. In this way, you can specify a list of domain names to which all returned sites must match.
• Maximum Hits : Allows Archie to generate at most the specified number of matches (permissible range: 0-200; default: 100).
• Maximum Hits Per Match : Across all the anonymous FTP and Web archives on the Internet (and even on one single anonymous FTP archive) many files will have the same name. For example, if you search for a very common filename like "README" you can get hundreds even thousands of matches. You can limit the number of files with the same name through this variable.
• Maximum Match : This variable will limit the number filenames (or strings matched) returned. For example, if maxmatch is set to 2 and you perform a substring search for the string "etc", and the database contains filenames "etca", "betc" and "detc" only the filenames "etca" and "betc" will be returned. However, depending on the values of maxhitspm and maxhits you will get back a number of actual files with those names.