ID Utils

★ wanayoo — archive 1999 http://www.gnu.org/software/idutils/idutils.html

An "ID database" is a binary file containing a list of file names, a list of tokens, and a sparse matrix indicating which tokens appear in which files.

With this database and some tools to query it, many text-searching tasks become simpler and faster. For example, you can list all files that reference a particular `#include' file throughout a huge source hierarchy, search for all the memos containing references to a project, or automatically invoke an editor on all files containing references to some function or variable. Anyone with a large software project to maintain, or a large set of text files to organize, can benefit from the ID utilities.

Although the name `ID' is short for `identifier', the ID utilities handle more than just identifiers; they also treat other kinds of tokens, most notably numeric constants, and the contents of certain character strings.

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Updated: 11 Dec 1999 jonas