User Guide

104 Chapter 9: Indexing Collections with Verity Spider
At its most basic level, a Verity Spider command consists of the following:
vspider -initialize -collection coll [options]
Where -initialize is -start or -refresh (when starting points have changed), and
-collection is required to provide a target for the Verity Spider, and [options] can be a near-
limitless combination of the options described later in this chapter.
For example:
c:\cfusionmx\lib\_nti40\bin\vspider -common c:\cfusionmx\lib\common
-collection c:\new -start http://localhost -indinclude *
There are dependencies for other options, depending on the nature of the indexing task. The
following are some examples:
• To build a new collection, you must use -style.
• To control how Verity Spider operates, including which documents it indexes, use some Verity
Spider options.
If you do not run the Verity Spider executable from its default installation directory, you must
include that directory in your path. This is because the Verity Spider executable depends on other
files to run properly.
Using a command file
For simpler reuse and archiving of your indexing commands, use the
-cmdfile option for
abstraction. By using an ASCII text file to store a task’s options, you avoid the potential problem
of using special characters in an option’s parameter value. For example, the
-processbif option
requires the use of "!*" and therefore any task using that option must also use the
-cmdfile
option.
Command-line option reference
The following sections describe the Verity Spider V3.7 command-line options. Option names are
case-sensitive.
-start
Specifies a starting point for an indexing job. You can specify multiple instances, or use multiple
values in a single instance.
When you execute an indexing job from a command line, and you do not use a command file
(with the
-cmdfile option), you must URL-escape any special characters in the starting point. To
URL-escape a special character, use "%hex-ASCII-character-number" in place of the character.
For example, use /time%26/ instead of /time&/. This allows the operating system to properly
process the command string.