GLIMPSE
A tool to search entire file systems
This document is a slightly revised copy of the
Glimpse Home Page.
Introduction
Glimpse is a very powerful indexing and query system that allows you to
search through all your files very quickly. It can be used by
individuals for their personal file systems as well as by organizations
for large data collections. Glimpse is the main search engine in
Harvest.
Glimpse is now at version 2.1, which improves the
original version in many ways.
Glimpseindex, which you run by saying
glimpseindex DIR
builds an
index of all text files in the tree rooted at DIR.
(e.g., glimpseindex ~ indexes all your files.) With it, glimpse can
search through all files much the same way as agrep (or any other
grep), except that you don't have to specify file names and the search
is fast. For example,
glimpse -1 unbelievable
will find all occurrences (in all your files!) of "unbelievable"
allowing one spelling error;
glimpse -F mail arizona
will find all occurrences of "arizona" in all files with "mail" somewhere
in their name;
glimpse 'Arizona desert;windsurfing'
will find all lines that contain both "Arizona desert" and "windsurfing".
Glimpse supports three types of indexes: a tiny one (2-3% of the
size of all files), a small one (7-9%), and a medium one (20-30%).
The larger the index the faster the search.
Glimpse supports most of agrep's options (agrep is our powerful version
of grep, and it is part of glimpse) including approximate matching
(e.g., finding misspelled words), Boolean queries, and even some
limited forms of regular expressions.
Demos
Documentation
Software
GlimpseHTTP
GlimpseHTTP
is a collection of tools that allows you to use
Glimpse to search your files using HTTP interface.
You find it as a good alternative for WAIS search scripts.
To be put on glimpse mailing list, send mail to
glimpse-request@cs.arizona.edu
Version 2.1 improves version 2.0
in many ways. The main changes are listed below.
Or look at the changes in previous versions.
- Added the facility to run a glimpse server which reads the index into
memory and stays in the background. Regular glimpse then submits queries
to the server and echoes the replies. This can improve performance if
the index is large since it doesn't have to be read-in for each query.
Glimpse can contact (local or remote) servers using the
-C, -J and -K
options (see the man-pages
for more details).
- Optimized the performance of glimpse for very large structured indexes:
this is mostly relevant in
Harvest.1.1.
Such indexes now take half the
space, the indexing can be done in half the time, and structured queries
are faster by a factor of 2 to 5!
- Made code more portable: the code now runs on the following machines
and operating systems:
- SUNOS
- ALPHA
- SOLARIS
- HPUX
- AIX
- LINUX
- Added much improved man pages for
glimpse,
glimpseserver and
glimpseindex.
- Many bugs were fixed based on the reports received for
glimpse.2.0
and Harvest.1.0.
The code is now more robust, portable and readable.
Udi Manber, Sun Wu, and Burra Gopal.
glimpse@cs.arizona.edu
Server information
- Statistics
-
- Administrator
-
Paul Klark
paul@cs.arizona.edu
Return to Welcome Home Page or
Continue to Browse
