This package holds THREE little search utilities. ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------- 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' ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------- For further documentation see as well the "find" article from LinuxFocus.org: http://linuxfocus.org/English/September1998/article64.html ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------- whichman's home is http://main.linuxfocus.org/~guido/ Author: Guido Socher, guido(at)linuxfocus.org