Version 2.1.1
Released on Tuesday, 12 January 1999
Created by Matthijs Hollemans
mahlzeit@bigfoot.com
http://home.concepts.nl/~hollies/
Tracker Grep is a simple Tracker add-on that I knocked up in a couple of hours because I got tired of going into a Terminal every time I wanted to do a grep. For those of you in the unknown, grep is a very handy command-line tool that searches text files for lines that match a given pattern. Gone are those days of command-line trouble, because from now on Tracker Grep lets you run grep directly from the Tracker.
Put the file "Tracker Grep-G" into the directory
"/boot/home/config/add-ons/Tracker/". (The -G
suffix on the filename is the keyboard shortcut). The easiest way to do
this is by dragging the "Tracker Grep-G" icon into the
folder called "Drop the add-on here".
Select the files that you want to examine. Then right-click on one
of the files or open the "File" menu of the Tracker. Go
to "Add-Ons" and choose "Tracker Grep".
Alternatively you can press the keys "RightCtrl-Alt-G"
(PC keyboard) or "Command-Control-G" (Macintosh keyboard).
If you don't select any files at all, Tracker Grep will look at all the
files in the current directory.
In addition to that, you can tell Tracker Grep to look into sub-directories and follow symbolic links as well. But if you do, then be aware that some of your links may be circular (they indirectly point at each other) which causes the search to loop forever if you don't cancel it at some point.
Tracker Grep is no more than a graphical front-end to the grep tool
that comes with the BeOS. (Grep lives inside the directory
"/boot/beos/bin" in case you were wondering.) To be able
to use Tracker Grep, you must know how grep works. See the
BeOS
Shell Tools Documentation for more information.
The search pattern that you type in the window of Tracker Grep is
literally transferred to grep. Since grep runs in the shell,
characters such as ( and * are not valid--they
have a special meaning. You should "escape" those characters with a
backslash; in other words, ( becomes \( and
* becomes \*. Another option is to surround the
search pattern with double quotes, for example "printf(".
(Maybe this sounds funny to you, but I felt no urge to change it,
because people that are used to running grep from the shell expect this
kind of behaviour.)
Because grep was meant to examine text files, Tracker Grep
will only work on files that have the MIME supertype
"text" or "message". Normally this is true
for all your text files, HTML files, e-mail messages, source code
files and so on. If a file has another MIME type (or none at all), it
will be ignored.
Version 2.1.1 of Tracker Grep is public domain, which means that you may do anything you like with it. It comes with full source for those with enquiring minds. Disclaimer of warranty: I am not responsible for whatever may happen to whomever, whenever.
Version 1.0.0 (Saturday, 4 July 1998)