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)