So you've started on a new project and you've set up the Squealer. But you also want to search your previous project source for reference - and perhaps also some common source that all your projects use. But you don't want to pollute your new project searches with old stuff that you only view occasionally. The solution is Squealer Projects.

How it works

Each Squealer project has a squealer.conf file that defines its search directories to include and exclude. In fact a Squealer project is defined by one squealer.conf file. And each Squealer project has it's own set of dictionaries. To add more Squealer projects you just add more squealer.conf files and link them all back to your main Squealer project. Your main Squealer project is defined to be the squealer.conf file that bootstraps your Squealer (i.e. the squealer.conf file that exists in the directory where you chdir to before running squealer.pl (or the path you pass in with the -startdir option).

The Squealer stores your currently selected project for each user. If you don't have one it will use the default. It will also use the default if it can't load the linked project. So to see a list of the projects you have available to you hit F3 and type:

    $   -p
        

Any paths defined in your main %projects hash that don't exist will not be shown here. Once you do a reload of the dictionaries (-load) for this project, from now on any finds, searches, greps will use the dictionaries from your selected project. If you can't remember which project you're in, hit F3 and press return (or look for the * in the list).

Adding a New Project

• Copy a squealer.conf from your main project and copy to a home directory for it, say <codebase>/bin directory inside the root directory of the new codebase.
• Update the new project's squealer.conf:
  1. Set HOME path in %path to be home directory <codebase>/bin .
  2. Set any paths in %includesearchdir to be directories you want to search on. This must be fully qualified paths that should contain forward slashes and may be UNC paths.
  3. Set any paths in %excludesearchdir to be directories within the %includesearchdir hash that you want to exclude from the search on. This should be fully qualified paths that should contain forward slashes and may be UNC paths.
  4. Set $defaultproject to be name of your new project.
• Add a new item in the %project hash in your main project's squealer.conf file that points to the new project's squealer.conf.
• Hit F3 then type -p to select it.