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. If this
variable is not defined, then it uses
/usr/share/man:/usr/man:/usr/X11R6/man:
/usr/local/share/man:/usr/local/man by default.
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.
EXAMPLE¶
whichman print
This will e.g. find the man-pages:
/usr/share/man/man1/printf.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/printf.3.gz
/usr/share/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)