xenial (1) ftwhich.1.gz

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)