From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Mar 22 07:53:28 1995
Return-Path: questions-owner
Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id HAA07582 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 22 Mar 1995 07:53:28 -0800
Received: from netcom13.netcom.com (root@netcom13.netcom.com [192.100.81.125]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id HAA07576 for <questions@FreeBSD.org>; Wed, 22 Mar 1995 07:53:26 -0800
Received: by netcom13.netcom.com (8.6.10/Netcom)
	id HAA01124; Wed, 22 Mar 1995 07:18:58 -0800
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 07:18:58 -0800
From: pascal@netcom.com (Richard A Childers)
Message-Id: <199503221518.HAA01124@netcom13.netcom.com>
To: PVinci@ix.netcom.com, questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re:  How to search through sources??
Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk


"How can I search through the sources to find a Procedure?  For example, 
 if I wanted to look at the panic() function.  Is there a tool that will 
 scan the sources?  (P.S. I'm not looking for panic())"


Well, before you go looking through the sources, try the man pages.

	% man -k panic		# finds all man pages with keyword 'panic'

Try a more manual approach to searching the man pages :

	% ls /usr/share/man/*/*panic*

( If you don't have the man pages installed correct this right away. )

If you still need to search the sources :

	% find /usr/src -type f -name '*panic*' -print

This will find all files with the pattern '*panic*' in the filename.

However, it is quite common for several routines ( function, procedures,
what have you ) to be collected into a single 'header' file, as a library,
so another technique ( taking this into account ) might be :

	% find /usr/src -type f -exec grep -n "panic" {} \; -print

This searches every file under /usr/src for the pattern "panic", printing
those lines it encounters the pattern in, followed by the name of the file
the line(s) were encountered in. ( The '-n' flag gives the line number. )
Redirect this into a file and use a text editor to browse it for the place
where the routine is originally defined.

Caveat : this is all based upon the assumption that /usr/src is readable
to the world or that you have placed yourself in the appropriate groups to
access the /usr/src tree. If you see 'Permission denied', you probably need
to try this as root ( although fixing the problem and returning to running
the search, as yourself, is really the best solution ).


-- richard

       Pontius Pilate was politically correct. So was Benedict Arnold.
       So was Vidkun Quisling ... and so was Adolph Hitler.	|-:

   richard childers        san francisco, california        pascal@netcom.com