st: Suggestions for hsearch

[Fred Wolfe <fwolfe@arthritis-research.org>]

Stata's -hsearch- program usefully searches help files in the ado 
directories. I would like to suggest a possible improvement to 
Statacorp, to expand the -build- option to optionally include 
specified directories and subdirectories, and to allow searches in 
restricted directories.

I usually keep my Stata projects in subdirectories of c:\statdata (my 
main Stata analysis directory). I try to write a help file for each 
project. So it would be useful to me to be able to extend hsearch to 
additional directories. In addition, it would helpful to restrict the 
search to a subset of directories, once the index is built.

One additional suggestion is to have an -only- option (only(fw)), 
essentially an -if- clause. If I am interested in this search:

hsearch death dead failure mortality

I get 131 matches. But I am only interested in help files that I have 
written. If I add my name to the match, the number of files found 
increases to 297, of which 197 have my name in them.

So perhaps the command could be:

hsearch death dead failure mortality,only(wordlist)

Meaning, only display matches that contain all of the words in the wordlist.

Thanks,

Fred Wolfe



Fred Wolfe
National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases
Wichita, Kansas
Tel +1 316 263 2125
fwolfe@arthritis-research.org


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