elman 🐧

A script for full text searching Linux man pages with Elasticsearch.

It has been developed to play around with the idea described in this post.

How does it work

Given that you have a running Elasticsearch instance, the script creates an index named elman and feeds it with the man pages of your Linux system using the apropos . command to get all available pages. Then you can use it to full text search the man pages as simple as:

elman concatenate files

Installation

It is a Ruby script so you must have the language installed.

Clone this repository and from withing the script's directory execute:

bundle

to install the elasticsearch gem and its dependencies.

Note

If you don't have bundler on your system, install it with:

gem install bundler

Setup the Elasticsearch index

To setup the index and load the man pages use:

./elman -s

or

./elman --setup

Changing defaults

The script creates a file under your home directory named .elman.yml. Change its contents to match your setup:

---
:elasticsearch:
  :host: localhost
  :port: '9200'
  :search_results_size: 10

Usage

Full text search

To search the man pages, use:

elman <query>

Example:

elman edit images

TODO

• Improve search definition

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/iridakos/elman/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

License

This tool is open source under the MIT License terms.