Command-line fulltext indexing?

Question

We have a huge, old, horrible codebase that makes it nearly impossible to find things when you need it. We're working on improving it, sure... but I often find myself doing massive recursive greps to search through the contents of files to find where things are used.

Is there a tool I can use to build a fulltext index of text files in a directory and then query that from the command-line?

Prefer something that can be run in user-space and doesn't need a daemon. We have many users on our dev server, so I want something that I can search through my instance of the codebase.

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of "gid" (aka "id-utils"):

• http://www.gnu.org/software/idutils/manual/idutils.html

Usage is simple:

1. Install id-utils with your favorite package manager (e.g. "sudo apt-get install" or "yum")

2. "cd" to the root of a source directory and run "mkid"

3. You can use it from the command line

4. You can also use it from "vim" or any number of other tools.