GLIMPSESERVER(1)

💖 GLIMPSESERVER 💖

okay bestie, welcome to glimpseserver — it's the server version of the glimpse searching package and it is so good at what it does. this is from the General Commands Manual, section 1 (user commands, the fun ones 💅). let's get into it.

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✨ OVERVIEW ✨

so like. Glimpse is an indexing and query system that lets you search through all your files very quickly. iconic behaviour, no notes.

the thing is, glimpse keeps showing up in servers that handle frequent queries — like, constantly, all the time — which is exactly why we wrote glimpseserver, to make those searches more efficient. 🦋

what glimpseserver actually does: it starts a process that listens to queries, runs glimpse, and sends the answers back. that's the whole vibe.

and the main advantage? the index is read only once into memory, saving a lot of IO. literally the glow-up. 🔥

glimpse talks to glimpseserver through a given port number. and bestie, please read the warning about security below. not optional. 🙈

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

glimpseserver [ -H dir -K port -J host.  ]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

the options, one by one, slay:

• -H dir — specifies the directory of the index. similar to the -H option of glimpse. the default directory is the value of the environment variable $HOME if that is set, otherwise it's the current directory. ✨
• -K port — this is the TCP port for communication: glimpseserver waits for requests on this port, and clients that want to search using the index specified by the -H option must use this port (by calling glimpse -K). the default port number is 2001. 🎯
• -J host — the name of the host. the default is the host where glimpseserver is running, which is probably the only possibility anyway. 🤷♀️

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🔄 RESTARTING 🔄

okay this part is genuinely so handy. if a new index is created by running glimpseindex every night, restarting a new glimpseserver is now easier: simply send a SIGUSR2 (signal #31 — i.e., "kill -31 pid") to glimpseserver; it then re-reads the NEW index and is ready to serve requests again. 🫶

(a SIGHUP, i.e., signal #1, can also be sent instead of SIGUSR2 to make the glimpseserver re-read the new index.)

the recommended way to do a fresh indexing while the server is still running is:

send SIGSTOP to glimpseserver
do the indexing
send SIGUSR2 to glimpseserver
send SIGCONT to glimpseserver (to ask it to continue after stop)

the SIGSTOP is required so that glimpseserver doesn't answer any queries while the indexing is going on. do not skip it, bestie. 💀

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🚨 WARNING 🚨

okay this is the serious one, so listen up. Glimpseserver should be used only for public servers. 🛑

any client that knows the port number can get any information available in the index — and port numbers are not that secret. like, at all. 🙈

when glimpse is run as a standalone application it requires read permission of the index and all the files. but when glimpse uses the -C option to communicate with glimpseserver, glimpse (the client) does not require any permission, because glimpseserver does all the searching. 👑

so: we recommend not to run glimpseserver on any data that should be protected. Glimpseserver is meant to be used for public data. periodt. 💜

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• glimpse(1)
• glimpseindex(1)

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🐛 BUGS 🐛

please submit bug reports or comments at http://webglimpse.net/bugzilla/ — they wanna hear from you fr fr. 💖

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Udi Manber and Burra Gopal, Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, and Sun Wu, the National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan. now maintained by Golda Velez at Internet WorkShop (Email: gvelez@webglimpse.net). legends only. 🌈⭐

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 — this one's from the General Commands Manual, GLIMPSESERVER(1), and it's dated October 13, 1997. yes, 1997. vintage. iconic. she ate and left no crumbs. 💅🦋

bye love u, go read the WARNING again 🫶