Biblook/bibindex 2.9

Biblook is a program for quickly searching through bibtex files. The simplest thing biblook allows you do is find all entries with a certain word in a certain field ("find author twain"). Search results can be displayed or saved into another bibtex file. You can also do much more complicated things, all of which are described in the biblook man page.

Bibindex is a support program that creates an index file for later use by biblook. You run bibindex once for each bibtex file you have. The indexing makes searching with biblook much faster than using something like grep or emacs. For details on how the indexing is done, see the bibindex man page.

Version 2.9 of bibindex/biblook was released on March 30, 1998. Thanks to Sariel Har-Peled, biblook now supports limited pattern matching. Search terms can contain multiple instances of ? (meaning any single character) and * (any string, including the empty string). For example, the query "find title *oi?t*" will find entries with title words like "disjoint", "moist", "points", "oiltanker", etc.

Earlier versions of biblook, including the ones distributed by CTAN and on various CD-ROMs, have several bugs that are fixed in the current version.

Biblook and bibindex were written by me, with numerous additions and bug fixes by other folks, especially Nelson Beebe, Sariel Har-Peled, Bill Jones, and Erik Schoenfelder. Their specific contributions are noted in the revision histories at the beginning of the source files. Bill Jones has pretty much completely taken over the maintenance of the program, as part of the computational geometry bibliography project. Even so, feel free to send me feedback (suggestions, bug reports, flames...).

Biblook and bibindex are in the public domain. You may use them and modify them to your heart's content, at your own risk. Please let me know if you make any major changes; I may want to incorporate them into the next release (if there ever is one).

Both programs are written in ANSI C and should compile under any ANSI-compliant C compiler (I recommend gcc). The source code is available as 44K gzipped tar file.


Web pages that use biblook

There are lots of them. Someday I'll make a list, but until then, take a look at search results from Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos.


Wish List

There are lots of things that biblook doesn't do. Maybe someday it will. Maybe not. Here's a list in decreasing order of likelihood.

Jeff Erickson (jeffe@cs.duke.edu) 31 Mar 1998

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