This package holds THREE little search utilities.
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whichman -- search utility for man pages and it works
much like the well known unix command "where".
It shows the the location of a given man-page by looking at
your MANPATH environment variable. whichman is especially
useful if you have forgotten the precise name of a
man-page/command since it performs case in-senstitive
approximate pattern searches. It does this be computing
the Levenshtein Distance between the search pattern and
the man-page name.
Here is a demonstration on how whichman compensates typing errors
or forgotten command names:
> whichman erep
/usr/man/man1/grep.1
/usr/man/man1/egrep.1
> whichman netwhat
/usr/man/man8/netstat.8
> whichman print
/usr/man/man1/printf.1.gz
/usr/man/man3/printf.3.gz
/usr/man/man3/rint.3.gz
... or to see in what sections a command is available:
> whichman -0 exit
/usr/man/man2/exit.2
/usr/man/man3/exit.3
/usr/man/man3/Exit.3
/usr/man/mann/exit.n
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ftff -- a fault tolerant file finder
ftff works like the whichman above but searches the directory
tree. This is a case in-sensitive and fault tolerant way of
'find . -name xxxx -print'
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ftwhich -- a fault tolerant "which" command
ftwhich finds files (programs) which are in one of the directories in
your PATH and uses a fault tolerant search algorithem.
Example, search all clocks:
> ftwhich -0 '*clock*'
/usr/X11/bin/xclock
/usr/X11/bin/rclock
/usr/X11/bin/moonclock
/usr/X11/bin/oclock
/usr/X11/bin/xdaliclock
/usr/openwin/bin/clock
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For further documentation see as well the "find" article
from LinuxFocus.org:
http://linuxfocus.org/English/September1998/article64.html
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Installation:
on most systems (especially Linux) you can just type
make
make install
This installes everything into /usr/...
To install into /usr/local you can run
make PREFIX=/usr/local install
instead.
The above method used the install program. To use normal copy
instead you can run:
make PREFIX=/usr/local install_with_cp
A spec file to build an rpm-package is also provided.
This utility set is free software and comes without any warrenty.
It falls under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL). You can
get a copy of the GPL at sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/LICENSES/gpl.license
Regards
Guido Socher
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History of whichman:
version 1.0 -first public release
version 1.1 -approximate stringmatch added
version 1.2 -optimisation in the approximate string match
-ftff added
version 1.3 -whichman bug fix. some.page.1 was before this
version read as 'some'
-show distance values with option -p
-bug fixes in the ftff.1 man page.
-option -f for ftff added.
version 1.4 -ftff bug fix: ftff /home/ something did produce
1998-04-17 duplicated slashes as e.g /home//xyz/something
-whichman, language dependent man pages can now
also be searched.
version 1.5 -ftff and whichman: new option parser
1999-01-29 and new option for case sensitive search.
-ftwhich added
version 1.6 -better Makefile
1999-05-17 -ftwhich: check if this is an executable file.
-ftwhich,whichman: better handling of broken path settings
version 1.7 -whichman did seg fault when MANPATH had spaces at the end, fixed
1999-09-16
version 1.8 -doc for ftff updated. Follow symlink and a symlink to ..
2000-04-11 causes naturaly an endless loop
-option -q to keep ftff quiet when it can not read a directory.
-option parser changed to accept -- as argumant to stop
option reading.
-Now we use option -I instead of -s
version 1.9 -print version in help text
2000-05-10 -whichman: accept manpages compressed with bz2
version 2.0 -calculate standard tolerance level with out
2001-05-04 taking wildcards into account.
version 2.1 -clean up warnings that you get with modern gcc
2002-10-07
version 2.2 -updated specfile
2003-01-04
version 2.3 -updated Makefile
2004-01-19
version 2.4 -gentoo ebuild file added and Makefile adjusted
2004-04-14
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whichman's home is http://main.linuxfocus.org/~guido/
Author: Guido Socher, guido(at)linuxfocus.org
