rosgrep: Fast full text search in the ROS tree

These instructions show you how to setup recoll (a full text indexing tool) to index ROS, which allows to grep the entire tree in a fraction of a second.

• Step 1: Install recoll

Karmic contains the proper version:

sudo apt-get install recoll

For earlier distros:

wget http://pr.willowgarage.com/downloads/recoll_1.12.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i recoll_1.12.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

• Step 2: configure recoll to index ROS

  mkdir -p ~/.recoll
  cat > ~/.recoll/recoll.conf <<EOF
  topdirs = `dirname $ROS_ROOT`
  skippedNames = .svn .git *~ bin CMakeCache.txt CMakeFiles cmake_install.cmake build
  EOF

• Step 3: index ROS tree

  recollindex

  Optionally, you can add the following line to the /etc/crontab file so that it does the indexing periodically (at 3:30AM in the following example). Replace <user> with your username.

  30 3 * * * <user> recollindex > /tmp/recolltrace 2>&1

• Step 4: Add the following script to your path:

  cat > /tmp/rosgrep <<EOF
  #!/bin/bash
  SEARCH_CMD="recoll -t"
  FILTER_CMD="sed -e s/.*file:\/\/\([^]]*\).*/\1/"
  \${SEARCH_CMD} \$@ | \${FILTER_CMD}
  EOF
  chmod +x /tmp/rosgrep
  sudo mv /tmp/rosgrep /usr/local/bin/

• Step 5: Enjoy fast grepping in ROS

  rosgrep <search_term>