SWISH-RUN(1) SWISH-E Documentation SWISH-RUN(1)NAMESWISH-RUN - Running Swish-e and Command Line Switches
OVERVIEW
The Swish-e program is controlled by command line arguments (called
switches). Often, it is run manually from a shell (command prompt), or
from a program such as a CGI script that passes the command line argu‐
ments to swish.
Note: A number of the command line switches may be specified in the
Swish-e configuration file specified with the "-c" command line argu‐
ment. Please see SWISH-CONFIG for a complete description of available
configuration file directives.
There are two basic operating modes of Swish-e: indexing and searching.
There are command line arguments that are unique to each mode, and oth‐
ers that apply to both (yet may have different meaning depending on the
operating mode). These command line arguments are listed below,
grouped by:
INDEXING -- describes the command line arguments used while indexing.
SEARCHING -- lists the command line arguments used while searching.
OTHER SWITCHES -- lists switches that don't apply to searching or
indexing.
Beginning with Swish-e version 2.1, you may embed its search engine
into your applications. Please see SWISH-LIBRARY.
INDEXING
Swish-e indexing is initiated by passing command line arguments to
swish. The command line arguments used for searching are described in
SEARCHING. Also, see SWISH-SEARCH for examples of searching with
Swish-e.
Swish-e usage:
swish-e [-i dir file ... ] [-c file] [-f file] [-l] \
[-v (num)] [-S method(fs⎪http⎪prog)] [-N path]
The "-h" switch (help) will list the available Swish-e command line
arguments:
swish-e -h
Typically, most if not all indexing settings are placed in a configura‐
tion file (specified with the "-c" switch). Once the configuration
file is setup indexing is initiated as:
swish-e -c /path/to/config/file
See SWISH-CONFIG for information on the configuration file.
Security Note: If the swish binary is named swish-search then swish
will not allow any operation that would cause swish to write to the
index file.
When indexing it may be advisable to index to a temporary file, and
then after indexing has successfully completed rename the file to the
final location. This is especially important when replacing an index
that is currently in use.
swish-e -c swish.config -f index.tmp
[check return code from swish or look for err: output]
mv index.tmp index.swish-e
Indexing Command Line Arguments
-i *directories and/or files* (input file)
This specifies the directories and/or files to index. Directories
will be indexed recursively. This is typically specified in the
configuration file with the IndexDir directive instead of on the
command line. Use of this switch overrides the configuration file
settings.
-S [fs⎪http⎪prog] (document source/access mode)
This specifies the method to use for accessing documents to index.
Can be either "fs" for local indexing via the file system (the
default), "http" for spidering, or "prog" for reading documents
from an external program.
Located in the "conf" directory are example configuration files
that demonstrate indexing with the different document source meth‐
ods.
See the SWISH-FAQ for a discussion on the different indexing meth‐
ods, and the difference between spidering with the http method vs.
using the file system method.
fs - file system
The "fs" method simply reads files from a local (or networked)
drive. This is the default method if the "-S" switch is not
specified. See SWISH-CONFIG for configuration directives spe‐
cific to the "fs" method.
http - spider a web server
The "http" method is used to spider web servers. It uses an
included helper program called swishspider. See SWISH-CONFIG
for configuration directives specific to the "http" method.
Security Note: Under Windows swish passes the URLs fetched from
remote documents through the shell (swish uses the system()
command for running swishspider under Windows), and this may be
considered an additional security risk.
The "http" method is deprecated (or at least not very well
appreciated). Consider using the "prog" method described below
for spidering. There's a spider program available in the prog-
bin directory for use with the "prog" method. Here's a number
of limitation with this method that are solved with the "prog"
method:
* swishspider only spiders standard <a href="..."> links.
Frames and other links are not followed.
* By default, this method of spidering only indexes files
that have a content type of "text/*" (e.g. text/plain,
text/html, text/xml). You should use "DefaultContents" and
"IndexContents" to map file extensions to parsers used by
swish (e.g. "IndexContents HTML* .html .htm"), but this
will fail where a document does not have a file extension.
* Swish-e's "FileFilter" directive can be used with the
"http" access method, although it requires a separate
process (in addition to the swsihspider process) for each
document filtered.
* The SWISH::Filter modules can be used with the swishspider
program. SWISH::Filter provides a general purpose filter‐
ing system (see SWISH::Filter documentation). To use
SWISH::Filter set PERL5LIB to point to the location of the
SWISH module name space (typically /usr/local/lib/swish-e
under Unix). For example:
export PERL5LIB=/usr/local/lib/swish-e # bash, bourne shells
setenv PERL5LIB /usr/local/lib/swish-e # csh, tcsh
or under Windows
set PERL5LIB=c:\program files\swish-e2.4\lib\swish-e
SWISH::Filter is not enabled by default due to the overhead
of loading the modules for every document fetched.
The Swish-e distribution includes perl modules in the
SWISH::Filters::* namespace to make converting non-text
documents into a format that Swish-e can parse easy. As
mentioned above, the helper script swishspider will use
these modules if can be found via PERL5LIB. These modules
only provide an interface to programs that do the conver‐
sion. For example, you will need to download and install
the "catdoc" program to convert MSWord documents into text
for indexing. Please see filters/README to see how to use
this filter system.
prog - general purpose access method
The "prog" method is new to Swish-e version 2.2. It's designed
as a general purpose method to feed documents to swish from an
external program.
For example, the external program can read a database (e.g.
MySQL), spider a web server, or convert documents from one for‐
mat to another (e.g. pdf to html). Or, you can simply use it
to read the files of the file system (like "-S fs"), yet pro‐
vide you with full control of what files are indexed.
The external program name to run is passed to swish either by
the IndexDir directive, or via the "-i" option.
The program specified should be an absolute path as swish-e
will attempt to stat() the program to make sure it exists.
Swish does this to help in error reporting.
If the program specified with -i or IndexDir is not an absolute
path (i.e. does not include "/" ) then swish-e will append the
"libexecdir" directory defined during configuration. Typi‐
cally, libexecdir is set to "$prefix/lib/swish-e"
(/usr/local/lib/swish-e), but is platform and installation
dependent. Running swish-e -h will report the directory.
For example, the -S prog program "spider.pl" is a Perl helper
program for use with -S prog and is installed in libexecdir.
IndexDir spider.pl
SwishProgParameters default http://localhost/index.html
and swish-e will find spider.pl in libexecdir.
Additional parameters may be passed to the external program via
the SwishProgParameters directive. In the example above swish-
e will pass two parameters to spider.pl, "default" and
"http://localhost/index.html".
A special name "stdin" may be used with "-i" or IndexDir which
tells swish to read from standard input instead of from an
external program. See example below.
The external program prints to standard output (which swish
captures) a set of headers followed by the content of the file
to index. The output looks similar to an email message or a
HTTP document returned by a web server in that it includes
name/value pairs of headers, a blank line, and the content.
The content length is determined by a content-length header
supplied to swish by the program; there is no "end of record"
character or flag sent between documents. Therefore, it is
critical that the content-length header is correct. This is a
common source of errors.
One advantage of this method (over using filters, for example)
is that the external program is run only once for the entire
indexing job, instead of once for every document. This avoids
forking and creating a new process for every document, and
makes a huge difference when your external program is something
like perl that has a large startup cost.
Here's a simple example written in Perl:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
# Build a document
my $doc = <<EOF;
<html>
<head>
<title>Document Title</title>
</head>
<body>
This is the text.
</body>
</html>
EOF
# Prepare the headers for swish
my $path = 'Example.file';
my $size = length $doc;
my $mtime = time;
# Output the document (to swish)
print <<EOF;
Path-Name: $path
Content-Length: $size
Last-Mtime: $mtime
Document-Type: HTML*
EOF
print $doc;
The external program passes to swish a header. The header is
separated from the body of the document with a blank line. The
available headers are:
Path-Name:
This is the name of the file you are indexing. This can be
any string, so for example it could be an ID of a record in
a database, a URL or a simple file name.
This header is required.
Content-Length:
This header specifies the length in bytes of the document
that follows the header. This length must be exactly the
length of the document -- do not make the mistake of adding
an extra line feed at the end of the document.
This header is required.
Last-Mtime:
Thi parameter is the last modification time of the file,
and must be a time stamp (seconds since the Epoch on your
platform).
This header is not required.
Document-Type:
You may override swish's determination of document type
("Indexcontents") by using the "Document-Type:" header.
The document type is used to select which parser Swish-e
uses to parse the document's contents.
For example, a spider program might map the content-type
returned from a web server to one of the types Swish-e
understands. For example,
my $doc_type = 'HTML*' if $response->content_type =~ m!text/html!'
This header is not required.
Update-Mode:
When updating an incremental index this header can be used
to select the mode for updating the index. There are three
possible values:
Update
Remove
Index
"Update" will update the index with the given file if the
date of the given file is newer than the date of the file
already in the index. Setting to "Update" is the same as
using -u on the command line.
"Remove" mode will remove the file specified by the Path-
Name header. Setting "Remove" is the same as using -r on
the command line.
"Index" will add the file to the index. NOTE: swish-e will
not check to see if the file already exists.
If this header is not specified, the default is the mode
specified on the command line (-u, -r, or none).
This option is still experimental and is subject to change
in the future. Ask on the Swish-e list before using.
The above example program only returns one document and exits,
which is not very useful. Normally, your program would read
data from some source, such as files or a database, format as
XML, HTML, or text, and pass them to swish, one after another.
The "Content-Length:" header tells swish where each document
ends -- there is not any special "end of record" character or
marker.
To index with the above example you need to make sure that the
program is executable (and that the path to perl is correct),
and then call swish telling to run in "prog" mode, and the name
of the program to use for input.
% chmod 755 example.pl
% ./swish-e -S prog -i ./example.pl
Programs can and should be tested prior to running swish. For
example:
% ./example.pl > test.out
A few more useful example programs are provided in the swish-e
distribution located in the prog-bin directory. Some include
documentation:
% cd prog-bin
% perldoc spider.pl
Others are small examples that include comments:
% cd prog-bin
% less DirTree.pl
The spider.pl program can be used as a replacement for the -S
http method. It is far more feature-rich and offers much more
control over indexing.
If you use the special program name "stdin" with "-i" or
IndexDir then swish-e will read from standard input instead of
from a program. For example:
% ./example.pl --count=1000 /path/to/data ⎪ ./swish-e -S prog -i stdin
This is basically the same as using a swish-e configuration
file of:
SwishProgParameters --count=1000 /path/to/data
IndexDir ./example.pl
in a config file and running
% ./swish-e -S prog -c swish.conf
This gives an easy way to run swish without a configuration
file with a "-S prog" program that requires parameters. It
also means you can capture data to a file and then index more
once with the same data:
% ./example.pl /path/to/data --count=1000 > docs.txt
% cat docs.txt ⎪ ./swish-e -S prog -i stdin -c normal_index
% cat docs.txt ⎪ ./swish-e -S prog -i stdin -c fuzzy_index
Using "stdin" might also be useful for programs that call swish
(instead of swish calling the program).
(The reason "stdin" is used instead of the more common "-" dash
is due to the rotten way swish parses the command line. This
should be fixed in the future.)
The "prog" method bypasses some of the configuration parameters
available to the file system method -- settings such as "Index‐
Only", "FileRules", "FileMatch" and "FollowSymLinks" are
ignored when using the "prog" method. It's expected that these
operations are better accomplished in the external program
before passing the document onto swish. In other words, when
using the "prog" method, only send the documents to swish that
you want indexed.
You may use swish's filter feature with the "prog" method, but
performance will be better if you run filtering programs from
within your external program. See also filters/README for an
example how to easily add document converstion and filtering
into your Perl-based programs.
Notes when using -S prog on MS Windows
Windows does not use the shebang (#!) line of a program to
determine the program to run. So, when running, for example, a
perl program you may need to specify the perl.exe binary as the
program, and use the "SwishProgParameters" to name the file.
IndexDir e:/perl/bin/perl.exe
SwishProgParameters read_database.pl
Swish will replace the forward slashes with backslashes before
running the command specified with "IndexDir". Swish uses the
popen(3) command which passes the command through the shell.
-f *indexfile* (index file)
If you are indexing, this specifies the file to save the generated
index in, and you can only specify one file. See also IndexFile in
the configuration file.
If you are searching, this specifies the index files (one or more)
to search from. The default index file is index.swish-e in the cur‐
rent directory.
-c *file ...* (configuration files)
Specify the configuration file(s) to use for indexing. This file
contains many directives that control how Swish-e proceeds. See
SWISH-CONFIG for a complete listing of configuration file direc‐
tives.
Example:
swish-e -c docs.conf
If you specify a directory to index, an index file, or the verbose
option on the command-line, these values will override any speci‐
fied in the configuration file.
You can specify multiple configuration files. For example, you may
have one configuration file that has common site-wide settings, and
another for a specific index.
Examples:
1) swish-e -c swish-e.conf
2) swish-e -i /usr/local/www -f index.swish-e -v -c swish-e.conf
3) swish-e -c swish-e.conf stopwords.conf
1 The settings in the configuration file will be used to index a
site.
2 These command-line options will override anything in the config‐
uration file.
3 The variables in swish-e.conf will be read, then the variable in
stopwords.conf will be read. Note that if the same variables
occur in both files, older values may be written over.
-e (economy mode)
For large sites indexing may require more RAM than is available.
The "-e" switch tells swish to use disk space to store data struc‐
tures while indexing, saving memory. This option is recommended if
swish uses so much RAM that the computer begins to swap exces‐
sively, and you cannot increase available memory. The trade-off is
slightly longer indexing times, and a busy disk drive.
-l (symbolic links)
Specifying this option tells swish to follow symbolic links when
indexing. The configuration file value FollowSymLinks will over‐
ride the command-line value.
The default is not to follow symlinks. A small improvement in
indexing time my result from enabling FollowSymLinks since swish
does not need to stat every directory and file processed to deter‐
mine if it is a symbolic link.
-N path (index only newer files)
The "-N" option takes a path to a file, and only files newer than
the specified file will be indexed. This is helpful for creating
incremental indexes -- that is, indexes that contain just files
added since the last full index was created of all files.
Example (bad example)
swish-e -c config.file -N index.swish-e -f index.new
This will index as normal, but only files with a modified date
newer than index.swish-e will be indexed.
This is a bad example because it uses index.swish-e which one might
assume was the date of last indexing. The problem is that files
might have been added between the time indexing read the directory
and when the index.swish-e file was created -- which can be quite a
bit of time for very large indexing jobs.
The only solution is to prevent any new file additions while full
indexing is running. If this is impossible then it will be
slightly better to do this:
Full indexing:
touch indexing_time.file
swish-e -c config.file -f index.tmp
mv index.tmp index.full
Incremental indexing:
swish-e -c config.file -N indexing_time.file -f index.tmp
mv index.tmp index.incremental
Then search with
swish-e -w foo -f index.full index.incremental
or merge the indexes
swish-e -M index.full index.incremental index.tmp
mv index.tmp index.swish-e
swish-e -w foo
-r **incremental index format only** The "-r" option puts swish-e into
"removal" mode. Any input files (given with "-i" or the "IndexDir"
parameter) are removed from an existing index.
Example:
swish-e -r -i file.html
would remove file.html from the existing index.
-u **incremental index format only** The "-u" option puts swish-e into
"update" mode. The timestamp of each input file is compared against
the corresponding file in the existing index. If swish-e encoun‐
ters an input file that either does not exist yet in the index or
exists with a timestamp older than the input file, the input file
is updated in the index. Any words in the input file that have been
added or removed are reflected as such in the index.
Example:
swish-e -i file.html -u
would update the index.swish-e index with the contents of
file.html. If file.html was new, it would be added. If file.html
already existed in the index, its contents would be updated in the
index.
-v [0⎪1⎪2⎪3] (verbosity level)
The "-v" option can take a numerical value from 0 to 3. Specify 0
for completely silent operation and 3 for detailed reports.
If no value is given then 1 is assumed. See also IndexReport in
the configuration file.
Warnings and errors are reported regardless of the verbosity level.
In addition, all error and warnings are written to standard out.
This is for historical reasons (many scripts exist that parse stan‐
dard out for error messages).
-W (0⎪1⎪2⎪3) (parser warning level)
If using the libxml2 parser, the default parser warning level is
set at 2. Use the "-W" option to override that default. Most often,
you might want to turn it off altogether:
swish-e -W0 -i path/to/files
would fail silently if the parser encountered any errors.
SEARCHING
The following command line arguments are available when searching with
Swish-e. These switches are used to select the index to search, what
fields to search, and how and what to print as results.
This section just lists the available command line arguments and their
usage. Please see SWISH-SEARCH for detailed searching instructions.
Warning: If using Swish-e via a CGI interface, please see CGI Danger!
Security Note: If the swish binary is named swish-search then swish
will not allow any operation that would cause swish to write to the
index file.
Searching Command Line Arguments
-w *word1 word2 ...* (query words)
This performs a case-insensitive search using a number of keywords.
If no index file to search is specified (via the "-f" switch),
swish-e will try to search a file called index.swish-e in the cur‐
rent directory.
swish-e -w word
Phrase searching is accomplished by placing the quote delimiter (a
double-quote by default) around the search phrase.
swish-e -w 'word or "this phrase"'
Search would should be protected from the shell by quotes. Typi‐
cally, this is single quotes when running under Unix.
Under Windows command.com you may not need to use quotes, but you
will need to backslash the quotes used to delimit phrases:
swish-e -w \"a phrase\"
The phrase delimiter can be set with the "-P" switch.
The search may be limited to a MetaName. For example:
swish-e -w meta1=(foo or baz)
will only search within the meta1 tag.
Please see SWISH-SEARCH for a description of MetaNames
-f *file1 file2 ...* (index files)
Specifies the index file(s) used while searching. More than one
file may be listed, and each file will be searched. If no "-f"
switch is specified then the file index.swish-e in the current
directory will be used as the index file.
-m *number* (max results)
While searching, this specifies the maximum number of results to
return. The default is to return all results.
This switch is often used in conjunction with the "-b" switch to
return results one page at a time (strongly recommended for large
indexes).
-b *number* (beginning result)
Sets the begining search result to return (records are numbered
from 1). This switch can be used with the "-m" switch to return
results in groups or pages.
Example:
swish-e -w 'word' -b 1 -m 20 # first 'page'
swish-e -w 'word' -b 21 -m 20 # second 'page'
-t HBthec (context searching)
The "-t" option allows you to search for words that exist only in
specific HTML tags. Each character in the string you specify in the
argument to this option represents a different tag in which to
search for the word. H means all HEAD tags, B stands for BODY tags,
t is all TITLE tags, h is H1 to H6 (header) tags, e is emphasized
tags (this may be B, I, EM, or STRONG), and c is HTML comment tags
search only in header (<H*>) tags
swish-e -w word -t h
-d *string* (delimiter)
Set the delimiter used when printing results. By default, Swish-e
separates the output fields by a space, and places double-quotes
around the document title. This output may be hard to parse, so it
is recommended to use "-d" to specify a character or string used as
a separator between fields.
The string "dq" means "double-quotes".
swish-e -w word -d , # single char
swish-e -w word -d :: # string
swish-e -w word -d '"' # double quotes under Unix
swish-e -w word -d \" # double quotes under Windows
swish-e -w word -d dq # double quotes
The following control characters may also be specified: "\t \r \n
\f".
Warning: This string is passed directly to sprintf() and therefore
exposes a securty hole. Do not allow user data to set -d format
strings directly.
-P *character*
Sets the delimiter used for phrase searches. The default is double
quotes """.
Some examples under bash: (be careful about you shell metacharac‐
ters)
swish-e -P ^ -w 'title=^words in a phrase^'
swish-e -P \' -w "title='words in a pharse"'
-p *property1 property2 ...* (display properties)
This causes swish to print the listed property in the search
results. The properties are returned in the order they are listed
in the "-p" argument.
Properties are defined by the ProperNames directive in the configu‐
ration file (see SWISH-CONFIG) and properties must also be defined
in MetaNames. Swish stores the text of the meta name as a prop‐
erty, and then will return this text while searching if this option
is used.
Properties are very useful for returning data included in a source
documnet without having to re-read the source document while
searching. For example, this could be used to return a short docu‐
ment description. See also see Document Summeries and Property‐
Names in SWISH-CONFIG.
To return the subject and category properties while indexing.
swish-e -w word -p subject category
Properties are returned in double quotes. If a property contains
a double quote it is HTML escaped ("). See the "-x" switch
for a more advanced method of returning a list of properties.
NOTE: it is necessary to have indexed with the proper PropertyNames
directive in the user config file in order to use this option.
-s *property [asc⎪desc] ...* (sort)
Normally, search results are printed out in order of relevancy,
with the most relevant listed first. The "-s" sort switch allows
you to sort results in order of a specified property, where a prop‐
erty was defined using the MetaNames and PropertyNames directives
during indexing (see SWISH-CONFIG).
The string passed can include the strings "asc" and "desc" to spec‐
ify the sort order, and more than one property may be specified to
sort on more than one key.
Examples:
sort by title property ascending order
-s title
sort descending by title, ascending by name
-s title desc name asc
Note: Swish limits sort keys to 100 characters. This limit can be
changed by changing MAX_SORT_STRING_LEN in src/config.h and
rebuilding swish-e.
-L limit to a range of property values (Limit)
This is an experimental feature!
The "-L" switch can be used to limit search results to a range of
property values
Example:
swish-e -w foo -L swishtitle a m
finds all documents that contain the word "foo", and where the doc‐
ument's title is in the range of "a" to "m", inclusive. By
default, the case of the property is ignored, but this can be
changed by using PropertyNamesCompareCase configuation directive.
Limiting may be done with user-defined properties, as well.
For example, if you indexed documents that contain a created time‐
stamp in a meta tag:
<meta name="created_on" content="982648324">
Then you tell Swish that you have a property called "created_on",
and that it's a timestamp.
PropertyNamesDate created_on
After indexing you will be able to limit documents to a range of
timestamps:
-w foo -L created_on 946684800 949363199
will find documents containing the word foo and that have a cre‐
ated_on date from the start of Jan 1, 2000 to the end of Jan 31,
2000.
Note: swish currently does not parse dates; Unix timestamps must be
used.
Two special formats can be used:
-L swishtitle <= m
-L swishtitle >= m
Finds titles less than or equal, or grater than or equal to the
letter "m".
This feature will not work with "swishrank" or "swishdbfile" prop‐
erties.
This feature takes advantages of the pre-sorted tables built by
swish during indexing to make this feature fast while searching.
You should see in the indexing output a line such as:
6 properties sorted.
That indicates that six pre-sorted tables were built during index‐
ing. By default, all properties are presorted while indexing.
What properties are pre-sorted can be controlled by the configura‐
tion parameter "PreSortedIndex".
Using the "-L" switch on a property that was not pre-sorted will
still work, but may be much slower during searching.
Note that the PropertyNamesSortKeyLength setting is used for sort‐
ing properties. Using too small a PropertyNamesSortKeyLength could
result in -L selecting the wrong properties due to incomplete sort‐
ing.
This is an experimental feature, and its use and interface are sub‐
ject to change.
-x formatstring (extended output format)
The "-x" switch defines the output format string. The format
string can contain plain text and property names (including swish-
defined internal property names) and is used to generate the output
for every result. In addition, the output format of the property
name can be controlled with C-like printf format strings. This
feature overrides the cmdline switches "-d" and "-p", and a warning
will be generated if "-d" or "-p" are used with "-x".
Warning: The format string (fmt) is passed directly to sprintf()
and therefore exposes a securty hole. Do not allow user data to
set -x format strings directly.
For example, to return just the title, one per line, in the search
results:
swish-e -w ... -x '<swishtitle>\n' ...
Note: the "\n" may need to be protected from your shell.
See also ResultExtFormatName for a way to define named format
strings in the swish configuration file.
Format of "formatstring":
"text<propertyname>text<propertyname fmt=propfmtstr>text..."
Where propertyname is:
* the name of a user property as specified with the config file
directive "PropertyNames"
* the name of a swish Auto property (see below). These proper‐
ties are defined automatically by swish -- you do not need to
specify them with PropertyNames directive. (This may change in
the future.)
propertynames must be placed within "<" and ">".
User properties:
Swish-e allows you to specify certain META tags within your docu‐
ments that can be used as document properties. The contents of any
META tag that has been identified as a document property can be
returned as part of the search results. Doucment properties must
be defined while indexing using the PropertyNames configuration
directive (see SWISH-CONFIG).
Examples of user-defined PropertyNames:
<keywords>
<author>
<deliveredby>
<reference>
<id>
Auto properties:
Swish defines a number of "Auto" properties for each document
indexed. These are available for output when using the "-x" for‐
mat.
Name Type Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
swishreccount Integer Result record counter
swishtitle String Document title
swishrank Integer Result rank for this hit
swishdocpath String URL or filepath to document
swishdocsize Integer Document size in bytes
swishlastmodified Date Last modified date of document
swishdescription String Description of document (see:StoreDescription)
swishdbfile String Path of swish database indexfile
The Auto properties can also be specified using shortcuts:
Shortcut Property Name
----------------------
%c swishreccount
%d swishdescription
%D swishlastmodified
%I swishdbfile
%p swishdocpath
%r swishrank
%l swishdocsize
%t swishtitle
For example, these are equivalent:
-x '<swishrank>:<swishdocpath>:<swishtitle>\n'
-x '%r:%p:%t\n'
Use a double percent sign "%%" to enter a literal percent sign in
the output.
Formatstrings of properties:
Properties listed in an "-x" format string can include format con‐
trol strings. These "propertyformats" are used to control how the
contents of the associated property are printed. Property formats
are used like C-language printf formats. The property format is
specified by including the attribute "fmt" within the property tag.
Format strings cannot be used with the "%" shortcuts described
above.
General syntax:
-x '<propertyname fmt="propfmtstr">'
where "subfmt" controls the output format of "propertyname".
Examples of property format strings:
date type: <swishlastmodified fmt="%d.%m.%Y">
string type: <swishtitle fmt="%-40.35s">
integer type: <swishreccount fmt=/%8.8d/>
Please see the manual pages for strftime(3) and sprintf(3) for an
explanation of format strings. Note: some versions of strftime do
not offer the %s format string (number of seconds since the Epoch),
so swish provides a special format string "%ld" to display the num‐
ber of seconds since the Epoch.
The first character of a property format string defines the delim‐
iter for the format string. For example,
-x "<author fmt=[%20s]> ...\n"
-x "<author fmt='%20s'> ...\n"
-x "<author fmt=/%20s/> ...\n"
Standard predefined formats:
If you ommit the sub-format, the following formats are used:
String type: "%s" (like printf char *)
Integer type: "%d" (like printf int)
Float type: "%f" (like printf double)
Date type: "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" (like strftime)
Text in "formatstring" or "propfmtstr":
Text will be output as-is in format strings (and property format
strings). Special characters can be escaped with a backslash. To
get a new line for each result hit, you have to include the New‐
line-Character "\n" at the end of "fmtstr".
-x "<swishreccount>⎪<swishrank>⎪<swishdocpath>\n"
-x "Count=<swishreccount>, Rank=<swishrank>\n"
-x "Title=\<b\><swishtitle>\</b\>"
-x 'Date: <swishlastmodified fmt="%m/%d/%Y">\n'
-x 'Date in seconds: <swishlastmodified fmt=/%ld/>\n'
Control/Escape charcters:
you can use C-like control escapes in the format string:
known controls: \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v,
digit escapes: \xhexdigits \0octaldigits
character escapes: \anychar
Example,
swish -x "%c\t%r\t%p\t\"<swishtitle fmt=/%40s/>\"\n"
Examples of -x format strings:
-x "%c⎪%r⎪%p⎪%t⎪%D⎪%d\n"
-x "%c⎪%r⎪%p⎪%t⎪<swishdate fmt=/%A, %d. %B %Y/>⎪%d\n"
-x "<swishrank>\t<swishdocpath>\t<swishtitle>\t<keywords>\n
-x "xml_out: \<title\><swishtitle>\>\</title\>\n"
-x "xml_out: <swishtitle fmt='<title>%s</title>'>\n"
-H [0⎪1⎪2⎪3⎪<n>] (header output verbosity)
The "-H n" switch generates extened header output. This is most
useful when searching more than one index file at a time by speci‐
fying more than one index file with the "-f" switch. "-H 2" will
generate a set of headers specific to each index file. This gives
access to the settings used to generate each index file.
Even when searching a single index file, "-H n" will provided addi‐
tional information about the index file, how it was indexed, and
how swish is interperting the query.
-H 0 : print no header information, output only search result entries.
-H 1 : print standard result header (default).
-H 2 : print additional header information for each searched index file.
-H 3 : enhanced header output (e.g. print stopwords).
-H 9 : print diagnostic information in the header of the results (changed from: C<-v 4>)
-R [0⎪1] (Ranking Scheme)
This is an experimental feature!
The default ranking scheme in SWISH-E evaluates each word in a
query in terms of its frequency and position in each document. The
default scheme is 0.
New in version 2.4.3 you may optionally select an experimental
ranking scheme that, in addition to document frequency and posi‐
tion, uses Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), or the relative fre‐
quency of each word across all the indexes being searched, and Rel‐
ative Density, or the normalization of the frequency of a word in
relationship to the number of words in the document.
NOTE: IgnoreTotalWordCountWhenRanking must be set to no or 0 in
your index(es) for -R 1 to work.
Specify -R 1 to turn on IDF ranking. See the API documentation for
how to set the ranking scheme in your Perl or C program.
OTHER SWITCHES-V (version)
Print the current version.
-k *letter* (print out keywords)
The "-k" switch is used for testing and will cause swish to print
out all keywords in the index beginning with that letter. You may
enter "-k '*'" to generate a list of all words indexed by swish.
-D *index file* (debug index)
The -D option is no longer supported in version 2.2.
-T *options* (trace/debug swish)
The -T option is used to print out information that may be helpful
when debugging swish-e's operation. This option replaced the "-D"
option of previous versions.
Running "-T help" will print out a list of available *options*
Merging Index Files
In previous versions of Swish-e indexing would require a very large
amount of memory and the indexing process could be very slow. Merging
provided a way to index in chunks and then combine the indexes together
into a single index.
Indexing is much faster now and uses much less memory, and with the
"-e" switch very little memory is needed to index a large site.
Still, at times it can be useful to merge different index files into
one file for searching. This could be because you want to keep sepa‐
rate site indexes and a common one for a global search, or you have
separate collections of documents that you wish to search all at one
time, but manage separately.
-M *index1 index2 ... indexN out_index
Merges the indexes specified on the command line -- the last file
name entered is the output file. The output index must not exist
(otherwise merge will not proceed).
Only indexes that were indexed with common settings may be merged.
(e.g. don't mix stemming and non-stemming indexes, or indexes with
different WordCharacter settings, etc.).
Use the "-e" switch while merging to reduce memory usage.
Merge generates progress messages regardless of the setting of
"-v".
-c *configuration file*
Specify a configuration file while indexing to add administrative
information to the output index file.
Document Info
$Id: SWISH-RUN.pod 1741 2005-05-17 02:22:40Z karman $
.
2.4.7 2009-04-04 SWISH-RUN(1)
