% VSCAN README
% Michael Stone <[email protected]>
% February 1, 2011

`vscan` is a toolkit for making fast but crude measurements of the prevalence
of named textual features in algorithmically selected samples of large corpora.

It's useful in the same places as `find` and `grep` but it's designed to yield
more useful reports, e.g., by letting you name the patterns that you're
searching for and by storing the resulting matches in a SQLite database for
later correlation with upload or modification logs.

So far, we've used it, with some success, for

  a) hunting for JavaScript malware in FTP-accessible file systems and for

  b) hunting for call-sites of deprecated cryptographic primitives in large
     collections of source code.

To install `vscan`, please follow the instructions in the `INSTALL` file
located alongside this `README` or check to see whether `vscan` is available
through your favorite package manager.

For information on how to use `vscan`, please see the overview and command-
specific documentation in the `docs/` subdirectory of the source code. (Also,
take a look at the `config.lua` file alongisde this `README` -- it's got some
fun examples of nasty JavaScript patterns!)

Finally, please write if you have trouble getting `vscan` to work or if you've
done cool things with `vscan` that we might want to merge -- we'd love to hear
from you!