Next: More about XML, Previous: Multiple databases, Up: Tutorial

### 1.11 Listing database information

The `af` tool can be used to list information about an existing database. The `-l` option lists the documents contained in a database:

         $ af -l -d mydb

Each line of output takes the form:

         + docid parent filename begin end doctype

where ‘`docid`’ is an unique number identifying the document within the database, ‘`parent`’ is the docid of the document that “contains” this document (or 0 if no such relationship exists), ‘`filename`’ is the name of the file containing the document, ‘`begin`’ and ‘`end`’ are byte offsets indicating the beginning and ending of the document within the file, and ‘`doctype`’ is the name of the document type associated with the document.