Spotlight from R

This is used as

spotlight("correspondence")

It tells you every file (text or pdf or html) in which the
word "correspondence" occurs in $R_HOME/library. This does not just
search
titles, keywords, and headings in help files, but all files, and the
entire file, using the Spotlight database. It displays the results in
the pager, which in my case is AquaLess. Of course if you search for
"and"
or "R" you are in trouble, especially with 1000 packages installed.

spotlight<-function(word) {
place<-paste(Sys.getenv("R_HOME"),"/library/",sep="")
string<-paste("mdfind -onlyin",place,word,"|",getOption("pager"))
system(string, intern=TRUE)
}

Cool! You could augment that by adding your personal
library(*) to the mix as:

spotlight <- function(word) {
    system(sprintf("mdfind -onlyin %s -onlyin %s %s | %s",
                   file.path(R.home(),
                             "library"),
                   file.path(path.expand("~"),
                             "Library",
                             "R",
                             "library"),
                   word,
                   getOption("pager")),
           intern = TRUE)
}


*) mdfind doesn't take a directory path (as one might
expect) and repeating the 'onlyin' argument augments
the search location rather than overrides. What a unique
implementation...

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