Replace all occurrences of . If arbitrary cases for each letter should match, then each letter needs to be replaced with the upper and lower case versions of that letter in brackets. If neither the single nor multiple character matches have been used, then the search can probably be performed using a substring or subcase search, which should be faster than the regular expression search. The Archie database resides on a number of different machines on the Internet. A server on each machine allows users to query the database from their machines.
Clients programs are programs which contact the server to search the database.
By separating the client from the server, the load on the server is reduced, allowing faster processing of the searches. 4.1 Remote Client Access Remote client access is the preferred method to access the database. Since the Archie machine must only process the query, it has to do much less work than if the telnet or mail interfaces are used. This is especially true for version 2.X of the Archie system which handles interactive and mail queries very inefficiently. All version numbers and locations are the best sites I know as of Nov 14, 1993.