whichman - show the location of a man page using a fault tolerant approximate matching algorithm

Author

       Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)

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.

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

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

Name

       whichman - show the location of a man page using a fault tolerant approximate matching algorithm

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.