whichman(1) Search utilities whichman(1)
April 1998
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.
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.
- 1 - Formatted: April 20, 2024
whichman(1) Search utilities whichman(1)
April 1998
EXAMPLE
whichman print
This will e.g. find the man-pages:
/usr/man/man1/printf.1.gz
/usr/man/man3/printf.3.gz
/usr/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)
- 2 - Formatted: April 20, 2024
