The goal of this project would be to attempt an implementation of a trigram based full text search database for the mandoc project (https://mandoc.bsd.lv/)
UNIX system provide their documentation to the user through a set of tools collectively referred to as the Manual Page system. The well known man(1) command exists today on all UNIX systems but even on other platforms like MacOSX and android. Searching efficiently keywords and semantics has been of paramount importance for the user to quickly get to the relevant manual page and the command apropos(1) traditionally served that purpose, meaning doing database lookups. The database are built with the makewhatis(1) tool.
We will investigate the C source code of the mandoc project, targeted on the modules of searching and database building. We will understand how it works and how to extract manual page text using the mdoc library functions. Then we shall create a simplified trigram database of an an inverted index with the goal to connect it to the search capabilities.
You can read the final report in the pdf , and see the provided final-presentation.mp4 To compile the mandoc source code you can fetch it from https://mandoc.bsd.lv/ and compile it at the same directory level as this project.
st19 / solo project