bionic (1) ftff.1.gz

NAME

       ftff - fault tolerant file find utility

SYNOPSIS

       ftff [-#fFhIpq][-t#][start_directory] file_to_find

DESCRIPTION

       ftff  recursively descends the directory hierarchy and reports all objects in the file system with a name
       that approximately matches the given filename.

       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 A into a string B.

       ftff behaves like

       'find start_directory -name file_to_find -print'

       with the following differences:

       -      ftff is fault tolerant

       -      ftff is NOT case sensitive

       -      the level of fault tolerance can be adjusted by specifying the optional  parameter  tolerance.   A
              tolerance of 0 specifies exact match.

OPTIONS

       -h     Prints a little help/usage information.

       -f     Follow  symbolic  links  on  directories.  Note:  a  symbolic  link like "somewhere -> .."  causes
              naturally an endless loop.  By default ftff does not follow symbolic links to directories.

       -F     Classify the file type by appending a character to each file name. This character is:
              '*' for regular files that are  executable
              '/' for directories
              '@' for symbolic links
              '|' for FIFOs
              '=' for sockets

       -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).

       -q     keep quiet and do not print any warning about non readable directories.

       -# 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

       -I     Do case sensitive search (default is case in-sensitive)

       file_to_find
              The filename to search for.  '*' and '?'  can be used as wildcards.
              '?'  denotes one single character.
              '*' denotes an arbitrary number of characters.

       start_directory
              The directory to start the search. The current directory is the default.

       The last argument to ftff is not parsed for options as the program needs at least one file-name argument.
       This means that ftff -x will not complain about a wrong option but search for the file named -x.

EXAMPLE

       ftff samething

       This will e.g. find a file called something or sameting or sum-thing or ...

       To  find  all  files  that  start with any prefix, have something like IOComm in between and end on a two
       letter suffix:

       ftff '*iocomm.??'

       To find all files that exactly start with the prefix DuPeg:

       ftff -0 'dupeg*'

BUGS

       The wildcards '?'  and '*' 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.

AUTHOR

       Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)

SEE ALSO

       whichman(1), find(1)