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)