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
MAN(1) General Commands Manual MAN(1)NAME
man - print out the manual
SYNOPSIS
man [ - ] [ -a ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title ...
DESCRIPTION
Man is the program which provides on-line access to the UNIX manual. If a section specifier is given, man looks in that section of the
manual for the given title(s). Section is either an Arabic section number (``3'' for example), or one of the words ``local'', ``new,'' or
``old''. (The abbreviations ``l'', ``n'', and ``o'' are also allowed.) If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual,
giving preference to commands over library subroutines, and displays the first manual page it finds, if any. If the -a option is supplied,
man displays all applicable manual pages.
Normally man checks in standard locations (/usr/man and /usr/local/man) for manual information. This can be changed by supplying a search
path (a la the Bourne shell) with the -M flag. The search path is a colon (``:'') separated list of directories in which man expects to
find the standard manual subdirectories. This search path can also be set with the environmental variable MANPATH.
Since some manual pages are intended for use only on certain machines, man only searches those directories applicable to the current
machine. Man's determination of the current machine type can be overridden by setting the environmental variable MACHINE.
If the standard output is a teletype, and the - flag is not provided, man uses more(1), or the pager provided by the environmental variable
PAGER, to display the manual page.
The FORTRAN version of section 3 of the manual may be specified by supplying man with the section ``3f''. Also, a specific section of the
local manual may be specified by appending a number to the section, i.e. ``l5'' would indicate section 5 of the local manual.
FILES
/usr/man standard manual area
/usr/man/cat?/* directories containing standard manual pages
/usr/local/man/cat?/* directories containing local manual pages
/usr/src/man directories containing unformatted manual pages
SEE ALSO apropos(1), more(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)BUGS
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter, however, on a typewriter, some information is
necessarily lost.
4th Berkeley Distribution April 19, 1988 MAN(1)