>>>>> Thought writes: Thought> [...] Or better yet, is there a program that will search my Thought> whole disk (or at least all the data in a directory tree) Thought> for a word(s)? [...]
There's glimpse, which is a bit of grep-on-steroids. You run glimpseindex once, give it a directory (say) and it will search all files in that directory and make an index of them. You can then later say "glimpse foo" to search all files for "foo". There are various options to trade off index size vs search speed. There is a glimpse Debian package. If you want to do content-based searching in text (or text-like) files, I recommend freeWAIS-sf (http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/ir/projects/). With it, you can define fields in files (so you can index BIBTeX files or mails or whatever) based on regular expressions, and you can do a content-based search. freeWAIS-sf has operators for phonetic similarity, for example, and does stemming (so searching for "base" will find "bases", as well as "based", maybe even "basic"). regards, kai -- A large number of young women don't trust men with beards. (BFBS Radio)
