XAPIAN-QUEST(1)

📦 version 2.0.0, in alpine 3.24

👑 NAME 👑

xapian-quest — the Xapian command line search tool, and yes bestie, that's literally the whole vibe: it's a search tool, it lives in your terminal, it's giving main character energy. 🦋

So this page is the XAPIAN-QUEST(1) manual, from the User Commands corner of the manpage universe, and I'm gonna walk you through every single flag because I am obsessed with not skipping anything. ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xapian-quest [OPTIONS] 'QUERY'

That's it. Options, then your query. Put the query last, jellybean. 💅

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

xapian-quest — Xapian command line search tool. Same line as the NAME section because that's just how this page rolls, no cap.

NB: QUERY should be quoted to protect it from the shell. Like, actually quoted. Single quotes are your bestie here. If you don't quote it, the shell will eat your query alive and you'll be left standing there like 😭 — so please, for me, wrap it. 🎀

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

Every single one, in order, nothing skipped. Slay. 🔥

  • -d, --db=DIRECTORY — the database to search. And plot twist: you can specify multiple databases, so go ahead and be greedy, queen. 👑
  • -m, --msize=MSIZE — maximum number of matches to return. Basically, how many results you're willing to handle.
  • -c, --check-at-least=HOWMANY — minimum number of matches to check. Yes, it's a minimum. There's a max and there's a min, they're different, don't mix them up. 💀
  • -s, --stemmer=LANG — set the stemming language. Default is english. Pass none to disable stemming entirely (go off, no stemming era 🙈). Valid stemmers, all of them, here we go: arabic, armenian, basque, catalan, danish, dutch, dutch_porter, earlyenglish, english, esperanto, estonian, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, irish, italian, lithuanian, lovins, nepali, norwegian, polish, porter, portuguese, romanian, russian, serbian, spanish, swedish, tamil, turkish, yiddish
  • -S, --stem-strategy=STRATEGY — set the stemming strategy. Default: some. Valid strategies: all, all_z, none, some, some_full_pos. (Yes there's a none strategy and a none stemmer. They are different things. I know. I know. 💅)
  • -p, --prefix=PFX:TERMPFX — add a prefix. Format is literally PFX:TERMPFX, colon and all. 🫶
  • -b, --boolean-prefix=PFX:TERMPFX — add a boolean prefix. Same PFX:TERMPFX shape, but boolean-flavoured.
  • -f, --flags=FLAG1[,FLAG2]... — specify QueryParser flags. Default: default. Comma-separate them if you want more than one, okay? Valid flags, all 21 of them: accumulate, auto_multiword_synonyms, auto_synonyms, boolean, boolean_any_case, cjk_ngram, default, fuzzy, lovehate, ngrams, no_positions, no_proper_noun_heuristic, partial, phrase, pure_not, spelling_correction, synonym, wildcard, wildcard_glob, wildcard_multi, wildcard_single, word_breaks
  • -o, --default-op=OP — specify the QueryParser default operator. Default: or. Valid operators: and, elite_set, max, near, or, phrase, synonym.
  • -w, --weight=SCHEME — specify the weighting scheme to use. Here's the fun part: it can include parameters, like this:
--weight='bm25 1 0 0 1 0'

Default: bm25. Stars, all of them. ⭐

  • -F, --freqs — show query term frequencies. Little peek at what the terms are actually doing. 🔍
  • -h, --help — display this help and exit. The classic.
  • -v, --version — output version information and exit. Also the classic.

🧚 a lil sign-off 🧚

That's the whole page, bestie — this one came from xapian-core 2.0.0, dated March 2026, and it was a moment. 💜 Go quote your queries, go search your databases, go be iconic. 🦋✨🎀

If you forget to quote your QUERY and everything explodes, that's not on me, that's on the shell. 😭 💀
📦 where this page comes from