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, --binary
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, --alphanum
Dictionary character set and order, i.e., only alphanumeric characters are compared.
-f, --ignore-case
Ignore the case of alphabetic characters.
-t, --terminate termchar
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.
The -a and --alternative flags are ignored for compatibility.
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