README
1This package holds THREE little search utilities.
2
3-------------------------------------------------------------
4whichman -- search utility for man pages and it works
5 much like the well known unix command "where".
6
7It shows the the location of a given man-page by looking at
8your MANPATH environment variable. whichman is especially
9useful if you have forgotten the precise name of a
10man-page/command since it performs case in-senstitive
11approximate pattern searches. It does this be computing
12the Levenshtein Distance between the search pattern and
13the man-page name.
14
15Here is a demonstration on how whichman compensates typing errors
16or forgotten command names:
17> whichman erep
18/usr/man/man1/grep.1
19/usr/man/man1/egrep.1
20
21> whichman netwhat
22/usr/man/man8/netstat.8
23
24> whichman print
25/usr/man/man1/printf.1.gz
26/usr/man/man3/printf.3.gz
27/usr/man/man3/rint.3.gz
28
29... or to see in what sections a command is available:
30> whichman -0 exit
31/usr/man/man2/exit.2
32/usr/man/man3/exit.3
33/usr/man/man3/Exit.3
34/usr/man/mann/exit.n
35
36
37-------------------------------------------------------------
38ftff -- a fault tolerant file finder
39
40ftff works like the whichman above but searches the directory
41tree. This is a case in-sensitive and fault tolerant way of
42'find . -name xxxx -print'
43-------------------------------------------------------------
44ftwhich -- a fault tolerant "which" command
45
46ftwhich finds files (programs) which are in one of the directories in
47your PATH and uses a fault tolerant search algorithem.
48
49Example, search all clocks:
50> ftwhich -0 '*clock*'
51/usr/X11/bin/xclock
52/usr/X11/bin/rclock
53/usr/X11/bin/moonclock
54/usr/X11/bin/oclock
55/usr/X11/bin/xdaliclock
56/usr/openwin/bin/clock
57-------------------------------------------------------------
58
59For further documentation see as well the "find" article
60from LinuxFocus.org:
61http://linuxfocus.org/English/September1998/article64.html
62
63
64-------------------------------------------------------------
65Installation:
66on most systems (especially Linux) you can just type
67make
68make install
69This installes everything into /usr/...
70
71To install into /usr/local you can run
72make PREFIX=/usr/local install
73instead.
74
75The above method used the install program. To use normal copy
76instead you can run:
77make PREFIX=/usr/local install_with_cp
78
79A spec file to build an rpm-package is also provided.
80
81
82This utility set is free software and comes without any warrenty.
83It falls under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL). You can
84get a copy of the GPL at sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/LICENSES/gpl.license
85
86Regards
87 Guido Socher
88
89
90
91-------------------------------------------------------------
92History of whichman:
93version 1.0 -first public release
94
95version 1.1 -approximate stringmatch added
96
97version 1.2 -optimisation in the approximate string match
98 -ftff added
99
100version 1.3 -whichman bug fix. some.page.1 was before this
101 version read as 'some'
102 -show distance values with option -p
103 -bug fixes in the ftff.1 man page.
104 -option -f for ftff added.
105
106version 1.4 -ftff bug fix: ftff /home/ something did produce
1071998-04-17 duplicated slashes as e.g /home//xyz/something
108 -whichman, language dependent man pages can now
109 also be searched.
110
111version 1.5 -ftff and whichman: new option parser
1121999-01-29 and new option for case sensitive search.
113 -ftwhich added
114
115version 1.6 -better Makefile
1161999-05-17 -ftwhich: check if this is an executable file.
117 -ftwhich,whichman: better handling of broken path settings
118
119version 1.7 -whichman did seg fault when MANPATH had spaces at the end, fixed
1201999-09-16
121
122version 1.8 -doc for ftff updated. Follow symlink and a symlink to ..
1232000-04-11 causes naturaly an endless loop
124 -option -q to keep ftff quiet when it can not read a directory.
125 -option parser changed to accept -- as argumant to stop
126 option reading.
127 -Now we use option -I instead of -s
128version 1.9 -print version in help text
1292000-05-10 -whichman: accept manpages compressed with bz2
130
131version 2.0 -calculate standard tolerance level with out
1322001-05-04 taking wildcards into account.
133
134version 2.1 -clean up warnings that you get with modern gcc
1352002-10-07
136
137version 2.2 -updated specfile
1382003-01-04
139
140version 2.3 -updated Makefile
1412004-01-19
142
143version 2.4 -gentoo ebuild file added and Makefile adjusted
1442004-04-14
145
146-------------------------------------------------------------
147whichman's home is http://main.linuxfocus.org/~guido/
148
149Author: Guido Socher, guido(at)linuxfocus.org
150