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

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 03:43:01PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2017 at 12:51:32PM +0800, Paul Goyette wrote:
> > 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)?
> 
> It's not that easy as it would require building a complete second FTS
> index. The better approach I think is to just build a black list of
> words that shouldn't be stemmed.

BTW, one approach to start with such a black list would be to pick up
all man page names that are stemmed to something different.

Joerg