From: welchb@woods.ulowell.edu
Subject: Help in improving on HELP
Organization: University of Lowell
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 20:15:48 GMT

	I have long been dissatisfied that VMS, in its wonderful help
utility, often only gives help to those who already know what magic
key word they need help on.  For example, if you want to use a magnetic
tape, you must already know about ALLOCATE, INITIALIZE, MOUNT, SET MAGTAPE.
	In Unix, the enigmatic APROPOS never seems to work out correctly,
but it sort of has the right idea.
	I wanted to combine the two, and I admit (as you will see below)
that I have drastically gone off on yet another tangent.  My approach
started out as something like this:  Concatenate the source text of all 
the help files, and then use the power of the SEARCH command to find all
appropriate material.  For perhaps stupid reasons, I instead used the
route of the VERB utility which many of us have, and editted it by hand.
	I append a snippet of what I have accomplished.  It may have some
serious errors, since I still do not really understand the syntax of cld's,
since I did not settle on a good syntax for my way of showing things, and 
since I did not have the source text (or the output of $HELP) in front
of me in another window to assist in the editting.  
	Nevertheless, I still feel that output like this may be a powerful
subject for use with $SEARCH, since even with /WINDOW=1, you will always see
what verb a qualifier belongs to (if you happen to remember the qualifier word,
but forget what it belongs to), plus you will always see all the qualifiers
for any verb [if I get the file editted correctly].  You can also do weirder 
things like finding every command which allows "/LOG" or "/OUTPUT".  
	If you wish to 
a) tell me it has all been done before, 
b) encourage me, 
c) discourage me, 
d) make a better one, or 
e) get DEC to do it, 
please respond to wherever you feel is appropriate. 

 ALLOCATE / GENERIC / LOG

 APPEND   / ALLOCATION / CONTIGUOUS / EXTENSION / FILE_MAXIMUM / NEW_VERSION 
 APPEND   / PROTECTION / READ_CHECK / LOG / WRITE_CHECK / CONFIRM / EXCLUDE 
 APPEND   / BEFORE / SINCE / CREATED/ MODIFIED / EXPIRED / BACKUP / BY_OWNER
 APPEND   / APPLICATION_PROTOCOL

 ASSIGN   / SYSTEM / GROUP / JOB / PROCESS / USER_MODE / SUPERVISOR_MODE 
 ASSIGN   / EXECUTIVE_MODE / TABLE / LOG / NAME_ATTRIBUTES 
 ASSIGN   / TRANSLATION_ATTRIBUTES / QUEUE / MERGE

 ATTACH   / IDENTIFICATION

 BACKUP   / ANALYZE/ ASSIST / BACKUP / BEFORE / BLOCK_SIZE / BRIEF
 BACKUP   / BUFFER_COUNT / BY_OWNER / COMMENT / COMPARE / CONFIRM
 BACKUP   / CRC / CREATED / DELETE / DENSITY / ENCRYPT / EXCLUDE / EXPIRED
 BACKUP   / FAST / FILEMERGE / FULL / GROUP_SIZE / IGNORE / IMAGE / INCREMENTAL
 BACKUP   / INITIALIZE / INTERCHANGE / JOURNAL / LABEL / LIST / LOG
 BACKUP   / MEDIA_FORMAT / MODIFIED / NEW_VERSION / OVERLAY / OWNER_UIC
 BACKUP   / PHYSICAL / PROTECTION / RECORD / RELEASE_TAPE / REPLACE / REWIND
 BACKUP   / SAVE_SET / SELECT / SINCE / TAPE_EXPIRATION
 BACKUP   / TRUNCATE / VERIFY / VOLUME

 CANCEL   / IDENTIFICATION

 CHECKSUM   / IMAGE / FILE

 CLOSE   / END_OF_FILE / ERROR / LOG

 COMMUNICATE   / CONNECT_ID, / REMOTE_ID, / SERVER_ID, / SYSTEM
 COMMUNICATE   / USER / VERSION / INITIALIZE, / INTRODUCTION

 CONNECT   / CONTINUE / LOGOUT

 CONVERT   / APPEND / CREATE, / DOCUMENT, / FDL / EXCEPTIONS_FILE / EXIT
 CONVERT   / FAST_LOAD / FILL_BUCKETS / FIXED_CONTROL / KEY, / MERGE, 
 CONVERT   / PAD / PROLOGUE, / READ_CHECK / SHARE / SORT, / SPREADSHEET, 
 CONVERT   / STATISTICS / TRUNCATE / WORK_FILES, / WRITE_CHECK / RECLAIM

 COPY   / ALLOCATION / CONCATENATE / CONTIGUOUS / EXTENSION / FILE_MAXIMUM
 COPY   / OVERLAY / PROTECTION / READ_CHECK / REPLACE / LOG / VOLUME
 COPY   / WRITE_CHECK / TRUNCATE / CONFIRM / EXCLUDE / BEFORE / SINCE / CREATED
 COPY   / MODIFIED / EXPIRED / BACKUP / BY_OWNER / APPLICATION_PROTOCOL

 DEALLOCATE   / ALL, syntax=DEALLOCATE_ALL_DEVICES

 DEASSIGN   / SYSTEM / GROUP / JOB / PROCESS / USER_MODE / SUPERVISOR_MODE
 DEASSIGN   / EXECUTIVE_MODE / TABLE
 DEASSIGN   / ALL / QUEUE

 DEBUG   / REMOTE,    / LOAD_FILE / GO / CONNECT

 DEFINE   / KEY / CHARACTERISTIC / FORM, syntax=DEFINE_FORM, nonnegatable

 DELETE   / APPLICATION_PROTOCOL / BACKUP / BEFORE / CONFIRM / CREATED
 DELETE   / ENTRY / ERASE / EXCLUDE / EXPIRED / INTRUSION_RECORD, 
 DELETE   / LOG / MODIFIED / QUEUE / SINCE
 DELETE   / SYMBOL, / GLOBAL / LOCAL / LOG / BY_OWNER
 DELETE   / KEY, / ALL  / BTS   / DHCF
 DELETE   / CHARACTERISTIC,  / FORM / MANAGER

 DEPOSIT   / ASCII / BYTE / DECIMAL / HEXADECIMAL
 DEPOSIT   / LONG / OCTAL / WORD, 

 DICTIONARY   keyword EXPORT,    / VERSION / CONVERT / LOG / SCHEMA
 DICTIONARY   keyword IMPORT,    / VERSION / LOG
 DICTIONARY   keyword OPERATOR

 DIFFERENCES   / CHANGE_BAR / COMMENT_DELIMITERS
 DIFFERENCES   / IGNORE,    keyword BLANK_LINES COMMENTS FORM_FEEDS HEADER
 DIFFERENCES   / IGNORE,    keyword TRAILING_SPACES SPACING EDITED EXACT PRETTY
 DIFFERENCES   / LINE_WIDTH / MATCH / MAXIMUM_DIFFERENCES / MERGED
 DIFFERENCES   / MODE,   keyword ASCII HEXADECIMAL OCTAL
 DIFFERENCES   / OUTPUT / PARALLEL / SEPARATED   keyword MASTER REVISION
 DIFFERENCES   / SLP / WIDTH / WINDOW /NUMBER

 DIRECTORY   / ACL / BACKUP / BEFORE / BRIEF / BY_OWNER / COLUMNS, / CREATED
 DIRECTORY   / DATE   keyword ALL CREATED EXPIRED MODIFIED BACKUP
 DIRECTORY   / EXCLUDE / EXPIRED / FILE_ID / FULL / GRAND_TOTAL / HEADING, 
 DIRECTORY   / MODIFIED / OUTPUT / OWNER   keyword IDENTIFIER / PRINTER
 DIRECTORY   / PROTECTION / SECURITY / SELECT   keyword SIZE ACL / SINCE
 DIRECTORY   / SIZE   keyword ALL ALLOCATION USED / TOTAL/ TRAILING, 
 DIRECTORY   / VERSIONS / WIDTH,   keyword DISPLAY FILENAME OWNER SIZE
-- 
Brendan Welch, UMass/Lowell, W1LPG,  welchb@woods.ulowell.edu