Enhancement request for 'provides.sh'

[maro]

As I had just posted something related, I thought I should really now write a quick note about the thought that has been lurking as a low priority suggestion in the back of my mind:

I wonder whether it is possible to enhance the 'provides.sh' (and the 'search.sh') "infrastructure" to allow for regular expression matching.

Most of the time I really want to narrow down my searches to quite specific regular expressions and since I maintain my own extension mirror it's no big deal for me to use the full "beauty" of 'grep'. One major reason to start this mirror was the wish to have full visibility of all the *.info, *.list and *.dep files.

As the "infrastructure" (e.g. http://www.tinycorelinux.com/cgi-bin/whatprovides3x.cgi) is hidden from my view I don't know what is involved. In the case of 'search.sh' I had formed the view that search.sh WHAT ; cat info.lst is similar to running grep -il -F WHAT *.info locally. But as indicate in my other post the workings of 'provides.sh' are a bit more mysterious to me.

I'm reasonable confident in solving problems with shell (or perl) scripts and would be happy to come up with a proposal, but for this it would probably be good to have some insight into the current mechanics.

[roberts]

I admit that cgi is not my forte. Provides searches an awk database.
I don't really want to expose cgi scripts in the forums.

You can PM me if perusing such an awk script is desirable.
Or you can email me your propsoed cgi solution.

Please don't post cgi suggestions here.