As a natural product chemist, memorizing data and chemical structures is routine in my job. Aside the brain, I was using a free-form database (which also allowed definition of flelds on-the-fly) driven through the emulation program 'wine'. In writing books it was of tremendous help.
Since I updated to lenny, wine is no more (or I am not) capable of running the engine. 15 days of frequents attempts (purging everything and reinstalling) could not solve the issue. I never moved to structured database as I preferred to use the database as a paper notebook, addressing the linking to the brain. I.e, it was nothing different from the traditional way we are used to study and follow the literature. Now I am forced to change, and I was also tired to follow the vagaries of wine. I thought to SQLite as the lightest alternative. I found it heavily structured. Not the way I am used in learning and planning. Therefore, I thought why not turning to 'grep' and and perhaps also 'wc' and other commands for processing text. I have a text file exported some time ago, the largest one of my databases (about marine natural products) and I am (for the time being) extremely impressed by the capability of grep. I can even retrieve - without fields - which marine organisms have been collected (for natural product extraction) between, say, 15 and 25m depth (a data retrieval that was only allowed by the wine-driven database through fields. Well, enthusiasm if often momentary. Before embarking with grep and allies, I wonder whether there is established experience with what I have described. That would help indeed. Thanks francesco pietra -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]