[chef] Re: knife search edge cases

[Zac Stevens < >]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 6:44 PM, Jeff Blaine < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I'm routinely frustrated by knife search queries. Is there a more
detailed guide that what's on docs.opscode.com or does anyone have any
general tips from past experience?

Which docs are you looking at?  I'd say http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_search.html is pretty detailed, and a vast improvement on the search docs I recall from the old wiki.  That said, nothing's perfect and I'm sure the Chef folks would appreciate feedback on what's missing.

Hopefully without diminishing the general query above and then only
getting explicit replies to these questions... how do I escape a ':'
that I want to match against in my query? how do I escape a ' '?

Any "special" character can be escaped with a backslash, and colon is included in that set (see http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_search.html#special-characters ).  You don't need to escape spaces.

Most of the things that I thought were under-documented in the past (eg, nested field syntax, gotchas searching for run list items) seem to be thoroughly covered in the current docs, so I'm coming up short on other hints and tips.  If you were expanding the docs, are there any particular headlines or topics you'd like to see filled out?

Zac