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

[Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2017, Terry Moore wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Jun 017, Paul Goyette wrote:
> > PG>	Don't get me wrong, I love apropos(1).  But...
> > PG>	I'm continually bitten by the "stemming" that occurs. [...]
> >
> > > So am I.  I completely switched over from "man -k" to an alias
> > > effecting "apropos -l" ("legacy"-mode):
> >
> > legacy mode is close, but it doesn't print the "context" information (and,
> if you use "apropos -l -m" you still don't get context info, but you do get
> extra blank lines).
>
> How about
> 	man -k lfs | grep -B2 '\<lfs'
>
> Loses some of the nice formatting, but seems to do what is needed.

Getting closer.  When the original match was in the context info, the 
output is fine.

But if the original match was in the title line, the output from

	grep -B2

includes context info from some previous match whether or not it 
contains the actual 'lfs' string.

And yes, the '--' separator lines from each chunk of output from grep 
are undesirable; of course I could remove them with another grep:

	apropos -k lfs | grep -B2 '\<lfs' | grep -v '^--'

:)

> This suggests that the "no stem" option could be implemented in man as a
> post-process, after the query, with negligible loss of efficiency.

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| Paul Goyette     | PGP Key fingerprint:     | E-mail addresses:          |
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