Description

This article is from the Scuba Diving FAQ, by njs@scifi.maid.com (Nick Simicich) with numerous contributions by others.

06 Are there any archive sites for rec.scuba? If so, how do I access the rec.scuba archives?

The Peter Yee Archives.

There are two rec.scuba archives. The first, and oldest, is maintained
by Peter Yee. Peter has collected travelogues, equipment reviews, and
so forth into pre-organized files. In Peter's own words:

You can also use the SCUBA archives on ames.arc.nasa.gov. Send
mail to archive-server@ames.arc.nasa.gov (or ames!archive-server)
and use a subject with a line like "send scuba index". This
will get you an index of articles in the archive. They are
sorted by subject and you will that you get pretty much what you
ask for. To get Florida info, try sending a subject of "send
scuba florida.txt keys.txt".

-Peter Yee
yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov
ames!yee

Advantages to Peter's archives are that they are organized by subject,
allow instant access if you have FTP, and are actually about the
subject in question rather than just randomly containing that word or
phrase. Follow this to the ames archive.

Scubasearch

The second archive is maintained by (me) Nick Simicich. This is sort
of a minimalist archive. There are over a years worth of articles in
the backlog, and you can run an "egrep" against them and the responses
will be organized and sent back to you. To use the archive, mail to
scubasearch@scifi.squawk.com (if that bounces - a correctly operating
scubasearch might take hours) scubasearch@scifi.emi.net.

You can also run a scubasearch through the web if you have a form
capable browser. To run a scubasearch through the web, click here,
which will lead you to
http://scifi.squawk.com/cgi-bin/scubasearch-cgi.

If submitting your search by email, place the search pattern you want
in your Subject: line. The search is CaSe InDePeNdEnT. Up to 10,000
result lines will be sent to you if you put in a general enough search
pattern. As an example, to find articles which contain the string
"dive watch", "diving watch" or close approximations, send mail to
scubasearch with "Subject: div.*watc". "div.*wat" would not be good
because that would get you "dive...water". Another bad search pattern
is "cuba" because that will select every article, because cuba is part
of scuba. Try "\<cuba\>" instead. Multiple level searches: Supposing
you want to find a posting that mentions accidents in the Cayman
islands. You could search for "accident.*Cayman|cayman.*accident", and
that would tend to find some of them, but it wouldn't find postings
where caymans was mentioned in the subject line (for example) and
"accident" was mentioned somewhere in the body. To get around this,
I've added a syntax that the shell script will use to run multiple
grep passes. You just separate the arguments to the successive grep
passes with an &. For our example above, you could code "Subject:
cayman & accident". The shell script will run grep against all of the
files with the argument "cayman" as he search string, and then run
grep again with the search string "accident" against the files that
result from the first pass. You can stack these to an arbitrary depth.
You can also get as complex as you want using this feature. For
example, you might want to do a search for articles that I didn't
write with cayman in the subject. This pattern might do it:

Subject: ^Subject:.*cayman & -v ^From:.*njs

-v can be specified on a second or subsequent grep pattern (after the
&, as shown above) and eliminates all articles that contain the grep
target. This is not a hook for general grep options. This is a special
option that changes the action of the shell script.

You can limit your searching to a particular date range by specifying
a line as follows:

Searchdates: [fromdate] [;todate]

The format of the date is pretty liberal, and can include patterns
such as "01 Jan 91" as well as "1 year ago". You can leave out the
todate, or leave out the fromdate just by starting with a semicolon.

You can get further information about egrep patterns by sending mail
to scubasearch with "Subject: help". There are more detailed
instructions regarding the date and the inverse searching in the help
file, as well.

You can get a copy of this FAQ by sending mail to scubasearch with
"Subject: FAQ". You can do a search for someone else by naming them in
a reply-to line, either in your mail header or the message body.

Advantages are that every posting is there. Disadvantages are that you
will get random stuff which happens to mention your search string if
it is not specific enough, and you might get tons of stuff you don't
want. If you do make a successful scubasearch, consider editing the
result and mailing it to Peter Yee for inclusion into the organized
rec.scuba archives so that the next person has instant access to the
information.

Note that due to a problem on the scifi system, the entire old article
database was wiped out on 8/21/94. The accumulation will start again.
Unforunately, it was just too big to back up with my limited
resources.

 

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