NAME

       ftwhich - fault tolerant search for a command name

SYNOPSIS

       ftwhich [-#hIp][-t#] program_name

DESCRIPTION

       ftwhich is a fault tolerant version of the which(1) command.  ftwhich searches for a given
       program in all directories included in your PATH  environment  variable  and  reports  all
       files with a name that approximately matches the given program_name.

       ftwhich  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.

       ftwhich is similar to the which command with the following differences:

       -      ftwhich is by default NOT case sensitive

       -      ftwhich is fault tolerant

       -      Some  shells  have a build in which command that will also search aliases.  ftwhich
              can naturally not search for aliases as it does not know about alias definitions.

       -      ftwhich lists all files that  approximately  match.  The  files  first  shown  take
              preference  over  files of the same name printed later as they are from directories
              listed earlier in the PATH.

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

OPTIONS

       -h     Prints help/usage information.

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

       -p     print the actual distance value in front of the found filename. This value is equal
              to the number of insertions, deletions and replacements necessary to transform  the
              name of the found program into the search key.

       -# 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

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

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

EXAMPLE

       Search for all programs like gcc in your PATH:
       ftwhich gcc
       This will e.g. find gcc or cc or CC ...

       To find all files that start with any prefix and end in config and  differ  in  2  letters
       from the word config:
       ftwhich -2 '*config'

       To find all files that exactly start with the prefix if:
       ftwhich -0 'if*'

       To find all clock programs:
       ftwhich -0 '*clock*'

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  command
       that has these characters in its name.

AUTHOR

       Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)

SEE ALSO

       whichman(1), ftff(1)