[olug] addendum/correction and more ways of helping yourself

Mike McNally mmcnally3 at prodigy.net
Sun Sep 17 20:53:25 UTC 2000


subtopic: usenet search, find comand

Thanks Mark, that was excellent.  I would add that if you have a well
defined specific problem that is stymying you, that mailing lists for
the offending program/ps or the network news is the way to go.  The
first thing I do when I have a problem like this is to go to deja.news
to search all the network news.  This is a very pervaisive search and
has a high probability of returning an answer to your exact problem.  If
it doesn't, then you can find and join a mailing list.
	http://www.deja.com/usenet
This site is my absolute favorite problem solving source (after the man
pgs).  Once you come up with the proper keyword set, and possibly limit
the search to key newsgroups (use this instead of making the keyword set
too restrictive), you will see questions just like yours.  Read the
replies.  

What if there are no replies?  Read the questions.  Pick somebody who
had your exact problem that seems to be pretty sharp and email him/her
directly.  This is the greatest strength of the internet, to be able to
find someone the has your exact question and confur with them as if they
live next door. If anybody knows how you can search all of the mailing
lists world wide, I would like to know how to do that as well.

Also: use this command to find documentation
	find dir -iname topic*
	find /usr/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/ -iname *mail*
	find /usr -iname program.name* | grep doc	# only the docs
	...still too much: add a pipe to less ( | less ) at the end
	...or use shift pgup as Vincent reccommended a day or 2 ago (news to
me)...thanks

	if you put find in a script you'll need "" around the search terms
mike

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