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whichman(1) [debian man page]

WHICHMAN(1)						      General Commands Manual						       WHICHMAN(1)

NAME
whichman - show the location of a man page using a fault tolerant approximate matching algorithm SYNOPSIS
whichman [-#ehIp][-t#] man-page-name DESCRIPTION
whichman is a "which" alike search command for man pages. whichman searches the MANPATH environment variable. If this variable is not defined, then it uses /usr/share/man:/usr/man:/usr/X11R6/man: /usr/local/share/man:/usr/local/man by default. Unlike "which" this program does not stop on the first match. The name should probably have been something like whereman as this is not a "which" at all. whichman shows all man-pages that match and allows you to identify the different sections to which the pages belong. whichman can handle international manpage path names for different languages. Man pages in different languages may be stored in .../man/<country_code>/man[1-9]/... By default, whichman does fault tolerant approximate string matching. With a default tolerance level of: (strlen(searchpattern) - number of wildcards)/6 + 1 OPTIONS
-h Prints a little help/usage information. -I Do case sensitive search (default is case in-sensitive) -e Use exact matching when searching for a given man-page and the wildcards * and ? are disabled. -p print the actual tolerance level in front of the man page name. -# or -t# Set the fault tolerance level to #. The fault tolerance level is a integer # in the range 0-255. It specifies the maximum number of errors permitted in finding the approximate match. A tolerance_level of zero allows exact matches only but does NOT disable the wildcards * and ?. The search key may contain the wildcards * and ? (but see -e option): '*' any arbitrary number of character '?' one character The last argument to whichman is not parsed for options as the program needs at least one man-page-name argument. This means that whichman -x will not complain about a wrong option but search for the man-page named -x. EXAMPLE
whichman print This will e.g. find the man-pages: /usr/share/man/man1/printf.1.gz /usr/share/man/man3/printf.3.gz /usr/share/man/man3/rint.3.gz BUGS
The wildcards '?' and '*' can not be escaped. These characters function always as wildcards. This is however not a big problem since there is hardly any man-page that has these characters in its name. AUTHOR
Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org) SEE ALSO
ftff(1), man(1) Search utilities April 1998 WHICHMAN(1)

Check Out this Related Man Page

FTFF(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   FTFF(1)

NAME
ftff - fault tolerant file find utility SYNOPSIS
ftff [-#fFhIpq][-t#][start_directory] file_to_find DESCRIPTION
ftff recursively descends the directory hierarchy and reports all objects in the file system with a name that approximately matches the given filename. ftff achieves fault tolerance by calculating the so called Weighted Levenshtein Distance. The Levenshtein Distance is defined as the minimum number of character insertions, deletions and replacements that transform a string A into a string B. ftff behaves like 'find start_directory -name file_to_find -print' with the following differences: - ftff is fault tolerant - ftff is NOT case sensitive - the level of fault tolerance can be adjusted by specifying the optional parameter tolerance. A tolerance of 0 specifies exact match. OPTIONS
-h Prints a little help/usage information. -f Follow symbolic links on directories. Note: a symbolic link like "somewhere -> .." causes naturally an endless loop. By default ftff does not follow symbolic links to directories. -F Classify the file type by appending a character to each file name. This character is: '*' for regular files that are executable '/' for directories '@' for symbolic links '|' for FIFOs '=' for sockets -p print the actual distance value in front of the filename. This value is equal to the number of insertions, deletions and replace- ments necessary to transform the file that was found into the search key (the file_to_find). -q keep quiet and do not print any warning about non readable directories. -# or -t# Set the fault tolerance level to #. The fault tolerance level is an integer in the range 0-255. It specifies the maximum number of errors permitted in finding the approximate match. The default tolerance is (strlen(searchpattern) - number of wildcards)/6 + 1 -I Do case sensitive search (default is case in-sensitive) file_to_find The filename to search for. '*' and '?' can be used as wildcards. '?' denotes one single character. '*' denotes an arbitrary number of characters. start_directory The directory to start the search. The current directory is the default. The last argument to ftff is not parsed for options as the program needs at least one file-name argument. This means that ftff -x will not complain about a wrong option but search for the file named -x. EXAMPLE
ftff samething This will e.g. find a file called something or sameting or sum-thing or ... To find all files that start with any prefix, have something like IOComm in between and end on a two letter suffix: ftff '*iocomm.??' To find all files that exactly start with the prefix DuPeg: ftff -0 'dupeg*' BUGS
The wildcards '?' and '*' can not be escaped. These characters function always as wildcards. This is however not a big problem since there is normally hardly any file that has these characters in its name. AUTHOR
Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org) SEE ALSO
whichman(1), find(1) Search utilities August 1998 FTFF(1)
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