archie Top Level

archie

archie is a program for finding files on the internet when you know the name or part of the name of the file you're looking for. archie is less often used than it was prior to the evolution of indexes on the World Wide Web. But archie still has its uses; you can perform more exact searches than you can with web search engines.

  1. Quick and Concise Document
  2. Beginners
    • What is archie
    • Using the archie client
    • Choosing an archie server
    • Using archie by email
    See also. . .
    • ncftp a replacement for the traditional ftp client

archie QCD Help

 Command             Description
 -------             -----------

 archie keyword      Conduct search for exact matches to keyword.

 archie -z keyword   Conduct a case insensitive search of substrings.

 archie -c keyword   Conduct a case sensitive search of substrings.

 archie -r regexp    Search using a regular expression.

 archie -L           List all archie servers.

 archie -h site.name Specify which server to use.

archie Beginner Help

What is Archie

archie is a "client" program; the command "archie" on the World runs a client, which submits your archie search to an "archie Server"

"archie" is a joke name, based on "archive"; it has no relation to the program "veronica".

An archie server is a machine on the Internet which goes out to anonymous ftp servers, and collects the names of all the files on those ftp servers. Anonymous ftp servers are the machines on which people put files they want to be publicly available.

How to use the archie client

The most common way to use archie is: 

        world% archie -z waffle
This command connects to a server and requests any files which have the string "waffle" in them, in upper or lower case (the -z switch is what makes it behave that way, without it, you need an exact match, sometimes that's what you want.) The software on the server takes the request and performs the search; therefore there's no significant load on World.

The archie database is quite large, so it may take a minute or two to begin returning answers to your query.

Without -z, archie looks for an exact match. Thus: 

   world% archie emacs
will find all anonymous FTP sites in the archie database that have files named emacs -- not emacs.19.tar or EMACS.

One of the real advantages of using archie as opposed to a web search is that it supports regular expressions. The usage is: 

   world% archie -r '[xX][lL]isp.*gz'

Choosing an Archie Server

Archie servers might be down; if you run archie and get a message about "dirlist" failed, that's probably what's up. You can specify another server. To get a listing of archie servers, use: 

        world% archie -L
To select a specific site to use as the server, type: 
        world% archie -h site.name -z search-name
To permanently set your default server, you can set the environment variable in your shell "run commands" file. 
        setenv ARCHIE_HOST site.name

Using archie by email

archie searches take a long time to finish. In particular, if you are searching for a "regular expression," which is often the only type of search worth doing, it usually takes much longer to complete than you want to wait.

As a simple example of an email search, send mail to "archie@archie.unl.edu". In the body of the message, type: 

	find moondog
or whatever you're looking for. Each line in the body of the message is a command. By default, archie performs a case-insensitive substring search (normally what you want.) You can use the command "help" to get a full list of commands, but here are the options that seem most useful to me.
end
use this as your last command. You don't absolutely need it but if you have a signature file and don't use it, your signature file will be interpreted as commands, generating error messages.
set maxhits NUMBER
sets the maximum number of hits you want to see. The default value is 100. For example, if you only want to see the first 10 hits 
	set maxhits 50
You might use this, for example, if you expect that anything that matches your search will be fine, and don't want the server to spend time looking for a bunch of hits. If your specification will match a zillion patterns and you can't be any more specific, e.g., if all you know is that your file will have "mail" in the name, you can bump the threshold higher.
set output terse
makes archie give output like: 
	ncbi.nlm.nih.gov  21:00  7 Feb 1994 512 bytes /repository/ps/ig/dog
	sgi.com  20:00 23 Sep 1994 512 bytes /sgi/Iris3000/dog
That output is easy for Unix shell scripts (or any program, spread sheet, etc., to deal with.)
set search regex
makes archie perform a regular expression search. For example, if you are looking for something that you think begins with "list" and ends with zip you could search for 
	"^[lL][iI][sS][tT].*[Zz][iI][Pp]".
Regular expression searches take dramatically longer than regular searches to complete.

You can send mail to any of addresses sites to have the search done for you.

If you send a help message (just put "help" at the beginning of a line in the body of a message to any of the addresses above), you get a lot of other sites around the world you can use, as well. 
HOME Top of Help Desk Eye On The World  The World Kiosk

             For further assistance, please send an email 
                   request to support@world.std.com

        Copyright 1995 Software Tool & Die, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

   Software Tool & Die, Inc., 1330 Beacon St. Suite 215 Brookline, MA 02146