Dear Madhav,
In addition to the concise explanation in the link Arjuna sent, one might add a word about the grep’s general utility for Indologists. With the already enormous and rapidly growing wealth of Sanskrit texts available in digital form from
GRETIL and many other sources, one now has at one’s fingertips a powerful tool that acts like a global index to all that material, not just to certain words but to any string of characters or co-occurrence of multiple strings. Moreover, your search will turn
up not just text names and page or line numbers but a chunk of surrounding text for each hit, so you can see and compare the words “in situ.”
You need only keep all your Sanskrit digital texts in a folder (along with any number of nested subfolders) and direct the editor’s search engine to search that entire folder (or any given subfolder) for a given string occurring any all
the files contained therein.
Of course you can use Finder on Mac to search folders or your entire drive for a particular string, but GREP allows searching using “regular expressions” (see
https://s3.amazonaws.com/BBSW-download/BBEdit_14.0_User_Manual.pdf, ch. 8 = pp. 189-222), to get maximally complete results despite variations in encoding, wording, spelling, sandhi,
etc., and find to multiple strings occurring in proximity to each but with a variable number of intervening characters, etc., etc.
Best,
Tim
_________________________________________
Timothy Lubin
Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Law
204 Tucker Hall
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia 24450
American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 2020–21
National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 2020–21
https://lubin.academic.wlu.edu/
http://wlu.academia.edu/TimothyLubin
https://ssrn.com/author=930949
https://dharma.hypotheses.org/people/lubin-timothy
From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces@list.indology.info> on behalf of INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info>
Reply-To: Arjuna S R <srarjunaa@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, September 17, 2021 at 7:15 PM
To: Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh@umich.edu>
Cc: INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Grep tool for searching on Mac
Dear Sir,
This link will help you know about 'grep' - http://qpeng.org/computer/grep.htm
Thank you.
Regards,
Arjuna
On Fri, 17 Sept 2021 at 21:30, Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote: