DELVE(1)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, this is the delve(1) page from the User Commands corner of manual-land. The tool is delve, and its whole flex is this: delve - Inspect the contents of a Xapian database. No cap, that's the assignment. 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

delve [OPTIONS] DATABASE...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

delve is literally the “Inspect the contents of a Xapian database” bestie. You point it at a Xapian database, and it shows you what’s inside. main character energy for database archaeology 💅

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -a — show all terms in the database. all of them, bestie.
• -A <prefix> — show all terms in the database with given prefix. Prefix-filtered term reveal, slay. 🌈
• -r <recno> — for term list(s). 🧚
• -t <term> — for posting list(s). 🎀
• -t <term> -r <recno> — for position list(s). 💜
• -s, --stemmer=LANG — set the stemming language, the default is 'none'. language vibe check.
• -1 — output one list entry per line. clean lines only.
• -V[<type>]<valueno> — output value valueno for each document referred to (or each document in the database if no -r options). <type> can be:
  • E: — escape in a C-like way (default)
  • I: — decode as a packed integer
  • R: — show the raw value (which may contain binary data, newlines, invalid UTF-8, etc)
  • S: — decode using Xapian::sortable_unserialise()
• -V[<type>] — output all values for each document referred to. <type> is as above. all the values, all the drama ✨
• -d — output document data for each document referred to. data dump activated.
• -z — for db, count documents with length 0. zero-length squad, rise.
• -v — extra info (wdf and len for postlist; wdf and termfreq for termlist; number of terms for db; termfreq when showing all terms; value bounds and freq when showing all values in a slot). the tea, but more of it.
• -vv — even more info (also show collection freq and wdf upper bound for terms). maximum tea mode.
• --help — display this help and exit. 🫶
• --version — output version information and exit. 🎀

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that's the whole page, bestie. slay — source/version is xapian-core 2.0.0, dated March 2026. 💖