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ftwhich(15)							     ftwhich(15)

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 envi-
     ronment 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 naturaly not search for aliases as it does not
	    know about alias definitions.

     -	    ftwhich  lists  all  files	that approximatly 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 op-
	    tional 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	replace-
	    ments  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  er-
	    rors  permitted in finding the approximate match. The default toler-
	    ance is (strlen(searchpattern) - number of wildcards)/6 + 1

     program_name
	    The program file to search for.  '*' and '?'  can be used  as  wild-
	    cards.
	    '?'  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  nor-
     mally hardly any command that has these characters in its name.

AUTHOR
     Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)

SEE ALSO
     whichman(1) ftff(1)

Search utilities		  January 1999			     ftwhich(15)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ftwhich&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

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