Re: What's the diff between glimpse -i -l -z and -N -y -z?

[Golda Velez <gvelez@iwhome.com>]

Hello Bryan

The -N option is a _very_ rough search.  It actually returns the "blocks" of
text with hits, instead of individual files.  So if you have lots of small
files, there probably will be more than one per block, and you will get
completely erroneous hits.  If you only have very large files, its likely that
-N will produce useful results most of the time, but you would always need to
verify the result set to get a precise search.

--G

On Fri, 04 Aug 2000, Bryan Thale wrote:
> What exactly is the difference between using glimpse options -i -l -z
> vs. -N -y -z?
> 
> I know -N searches only the index whereas -i -l searches the index and
> the files, but why do they return different result sets?  The -N option
> returns many more "matches" but many of the matches are false.  I'm
> getting matches returned for files that don't match my queries even
> remotely.  For example searching for 'compression;algorithm' returns
> files that don't contain either word in any form.
> 
> >From what I've been able to understand from the docs, I would expect
> both sets of options to return the same list of files in this case,
> namely all files that contain matches for '*compression*' and
> '*algorithm*' anywhere in the file.  Obviously, I'm missing some crucial
> point since that isn't what glimpse is giving me.  What am I missing and
> why is the -N option returning files that don't match the query?
> 
> I'm using glimpse 4.12.6 on RH Linux 6.1 if that makes any difference.
> 
> Thanks,
> Bryan.
> 
> --
> Bryan Thale
> Motorola Labs, Networking and Infrastructure Research
> mailto:thale@rsch.comm.mot.com