The search function
Introduction
This document explains how to use Aminet’s search function efficiently.
Note that it only deals with the search function of Aminet’s web
interface - if you’re interested in searching Aminet from a FTP or ADT
client, refer to the explanation of the ADT
protocol.
Simple search vs. advanced search
Aminet’s web interface offers two different search functions: The simple
search, which is available at the top right corner of every page of the
web interface, will search through all filenames and short: lines (i.e.
the 40 char descriptions of each file).
The advanced search is available by selecting “Search” from the menu at
the left side of every page on Aminet. It will let you search filenames,
descriptions or whole readmes and can filter the search results by date,
architecture or directory.
Supported wildcards
If you just enter a search term that does not contain any special
characters (see below), Aminet will find all matches containing your
search term - i.e. ‘foo’ will actually search for ‘#?foo#?’ and will
return all strings containing ‘foo’.
The search function also accepts wildcards: Just like under AmigaDOS,
#? will match anything, while ? will match a single
character. Please note that as soon as you use wildcards, searching will
try to match the exact phrase you entered, so you need to say ‘#?foo#?’
to match all strings containg foo while ‘foo#?’ will only find strings
starting with foo.
A good example is to search filenames for lha#? - this will find
all filenames starting with ‘lha’ and is the best way to find the actual
LhA executable without getting all LhA archives listed.
Note: Instead of #?, you can also use * or %.
Examples
search for lha#? -
find all package names starting with ‘lha’
search for Architecture:
ppc-amigaos - find
all AmigaOS 4 packages
search for DATE older
1992 - find
all packages older then 1992
search for filename = Quake and Architecture =
ppc-morphos -
find Quake ports for MorphOS
Sorting search results
Search results can be sorted by name (which is the default), version,
path, number of downloads, size, date or description. Simply click on
one of the column headers to sort the currently listed search results by
that particular criterium.
Note that this applies to Aminet directory listings aswell, as from a
technical point of view they are simply search results aswell.
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