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)