Re: Suggestion: add a "no-stemming" option to apropos(1)?

[Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 10:21 AM, Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost> wrote:
> Don't get me wrong, I love apropos(1).  But...

Thank you :)

> I'm continually bitten by the "stemming" that occurs.  Today's example
> is an attempt to find all the man pages that refer to file system lfs.
> Using "apropos lfs" returns more than 120 entries, complete with their
> associated context!  The vast majority of those entries are really for
> "lf" (in either upper- or lower-case), and have no relation to lfs the
> file system!
>
> Would it be unreasonable to add a no-stem option to apropos(1)?

As Joerg said, as an option it would be impractical. The better
approach would be to use a custom tokenizer which uses a blacklist of
words that should not be stemmed.

I was tinkering with it few months back and had it even working as a
proof of concept but now it seems I can't find the copy of the work I
did. I will try to redo it this weekend. Thanks for bringing it up :-)

-
Abhinav