LOOK(1) 						    BSD General Commands Manual 						   LOOK(1)

NAME

     look -- display lines beginning with a given string

SYNOPSIS

     look [-bdf] [-t termchar] string [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The look utility displays any lines in file which contain string as a prefix.

     If file is not specified, the file /usr/share/dict/words is used, only alphanumeric characters are compared and the case of alphabetic char-
     acters is ignored.

     The following options are available:

     -b      Use a binary search on the given word list. If you are ignoring case with -f or ignoring non-alphanumeric characters with -d, the
	     file must be sorted in the same way. Please note that these options are the default if no filename is given. See sort(1) for more
	     information on sorting files.

     -d      Dictionary character set and order, i.e., only alphanumeric characters are compared.

     -f      Ignore the case of alphabetic characters.

     -t      Specify a string termination character, i.e., only the characters in string up to and including the first occurrence of termchar are
	     compared.

ENVIRONMENT

     The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of the look utility.  Their effect is described in environ(7).

FILES

     /usr/share/dict/words  the dictionary

EXIT STATUS

     The look utility exits 0 if one or more lines were found and displayed, 1 if no lines were found, and >1 if an error occurred.

COMPATIBILITY

     The original manual page stated that tabs and blank characters participated in comparisons when the -d option was specified.  This was incor-
     rect and the current man page matches the historic implementation.

     look uses a linear search by default instead of a binary search, which is what most other implementations use by default.

SEE ALSO

     grep(1), sort(1)

HISTORY

     A look utility appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS

     Lines are not compared according to the current locale's collating order.	Input files must be sorted with LC_COLLATE set to 'C'.

BSD
								   July 17, 2004							       BSD