.\"
.\"     This is free software and distributed under the
.\"     terms of the Gnu Public License.
.\"
.TH FTFF 1 "August 1998" "Search utilities"  \" -*- nroff -*-
.SH NAME
ftff \- fault tolerant file find utility
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B ftff
[\-#fFhIpq][\-t#][start_directory] file_to_find
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B ftff
recursively descends the directory hierarchy and reports
all objects in the file system with a name that approximately
matches the given filename.
.PP
.B ftff
achieves  fault tolerance  by calculating the  so called
Weighted Levenshtein Distance. The Levenshtein Distance
is defined as the  minimum  number of  character insertions,
deletions and replacements that transform 
a string 
.I A 
into a string 
.I B.
.PP
.B ftff
behaves like 
.PP
.RB 'find\ start_directory\ \-name\ file_to_find\ \-print' 
.PP
with the following differences:
.TP
\- 
ftff is fault tolerant
.TP
\- 
ftff is NOT case sensitive
.TP
\- 
the level of fault tolerance can be adjusted by specifying the optional parameter 
.B tolerance.
A 
.B tolerance
of 0 specifies exact match.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.I \-h
Prints a little help/usage information.
.TP
.I \-f
Follow symbolic links on directories. Note: a symbolic link
like "somewhere \-> .."  causes naturally an endless loop. 
By default
.B ftff
does not follow symbolic links to directories.
.TP
.I \-F
Classify the file type by appending a character to each file name. This
character is:
.br
.I '*' 
for regular files that are  executable
.br
.I '/' 
for directories
.br
.I '@' 
for symbolic links
.br
.I '|' 
for FIFOs
.br
.I '=' 
for sockets
.TP
.I \-p
print the actual distance value in front of the filename. This value
is equal to the number of insertions, deletions and replacements necessary
to transform the file that was found into the search key (the file_to_find).
.TP
.I \-q
keep quiet and do not print any warning about non readable directories.
.TP
.I \-# or \-t#
Set the fault tolerance level to #.
The fault tolerance level is an integer in the range 0-255.
It specifies the maximum number of errors permitted in finding 
the approximate match. The default tolerance is (strlen(searchpattern) - number of wildcards)/6 + 1
.TP
.I \-I
Do case sensitive search (default is case in-sensitive)
.PP
.TP 
.I file_to_find
The filename to search for.  
.RB '*'
and 
.RB '?' 
can be used as wildcards.  
.br
.RB '?' 
denotes one single character.  
.br 
.RB '*' 
denotes an arbitrary number of characters.
.TP 
.I start_directory
The directory to start the search. The current directory is the default. 
.PP
The last argument to ftff is not parsed for options as the program needs
at least one file-name argument. This means that 
.I ftff \-x
will not complain about a wrong option but search for the file named \-x.
.SH EXAMPLE
.I  ftff 
.RB samething
.PP
This will e.g. find a file called something or sameting or sum-thing or ...
.PP
To find all files that start with any prefix, have something like IOComm in between and end on a two letter suffix:
.PP
.I  ftff 
.RB '*iocomm.??'
.PP
To find all files that exactly start with the prefix DuPeg:
.PP
.I ftff \-0 
.RB 'dupeg*' 
.PP
.SH BUGS
The wildcards 
.BR '?'
and 
.BR '*'
can not be escaped. These characters function always as
wildcards. This is however not a big problem since there is
normally hardly any file that has these characters in its name.
.SH AUTHOR
Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR whichman "(1), " find (1)