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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

FTWHICH(1)						      General Commands Manual							FTWHICH(1)

NAME
ftwhich - fault tolerant search for a command name SYNOPSIS
ftwhich [-#hIp][-t#] program_name DESCRIPTION
ftwhich is a fault tolerant version of the which(1) command. ftwhich searches for a given program in all directories included in your PATH environment variable and reports all files with a name that approximately matches the given program_name. ftwhich 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. ftwhich is similar to the which command with the following differences: - ftwhich is by default NOT case sensitive - ftwhich is fault tolerant - Some shells have a build in which command that will also search aliases. ftwhich can naturally not search for aliases as it does not know about alias definitions. - ftwhich lists all files that approximately match. The files first shown take preference over files of the same name printed later as they are from directories listed earlier in the PATH. - The level of fault tolerance can be adjusted by specifying the optional parameter tolerance. A tolerance of 0 specifies exact match. OPTIONS
-h Prints help/usage information. -I Do case sensitive search (default is case in-sensitive) -p print the actual distance value in front of the found filename. This value is equal to the number of insertions, deletions and replacements necessary to transform the name of the found program into the search key. -# 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 program_name The program file to search for. '*' and '?' can be used as wildcards. '?' denotes one single character. '*' denotes an arbitrary number of characters. The last argument to ftwhich is not parsed for options as the program needs at least one program_name argument. This means that ftwhich -x will not complain about a wrong option but search for the program named -x. EXAMPLE
Search for all programs like gcc in your PATH: ftwhich gcc This will e.g. find gcc or cc or CC ... To find all files that start with any prefix and end in config and differ in 2 letters from the word config: ftwhich -2 '*config' To find all files that exactly start with the prefix if: ftwhich -0 'if*' To find all clock programs: ftwhich -0 '*clock*' 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 command that has these characters in its name. AUTHOR
Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org) SEE ALSO
whichman(1), ftff(1) Search utilities January 1999 FTWHICH(1)
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