lkbib(1)

💖 lkbib — search bibliographic databases 💖

ok so bestie, welcome to lkbib(1) — the little icon that digs through your bibliographic databases and finds your references for you. it's a General Commands Manual moment fr fr, and i'm gonna walk you through it like we're texting at 2am 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

lkbib [-n] [-i fields] [-p file] ... [-t n] key ...

lkbib --help

lkbib -v

lkbib --version

like, that's the whole vibe check up there 👆 three ways to call her, pick your fighter 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the tea: lkbib searches bibliographic databases for references matching all the keywords key, and writes any references it finds to the standard output stream. slay 💅

it reads the databases given by the -p options first, and then — unless you pass -n — it hits up a default database too. and where does that default database come from, you ask? it's taken from the REFER environment variable if it's set, otherwise it's /usr/dict/papers/Ind. no cap, that's the fallback.

and here's the cute part 🎀: for each database file it's gonna search, if an index file .i created by indxbib(1) exists, then it searches that instead. iconic behavior. also each index can cover multiple databases, so it's giving efficiency queen 👑

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🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

• --help — displays a usage message. that's it. that's the whole job.
• -v, --version — show version information.
• -i string — when searching files that have no index, ignore the contents of fields whose names are in string. (no index? no problem, just skip those fields bestie 🙈)
• -n — suppress search of the default database. like, don't even look at it. not today.
• -p file — search file. and yes, you can stack multiple -p options, go off 🔥
• -t n — require only the first n characters of keys to be given. the default is 6.

heads up! --help, -v, and --version all exit afterward — so they're doing their little thing and then dipping immediately, no further searching. periodt 💀

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

• status 0 — successful operation. she ate, no crumbs ✨
• status 2 — the program cannot interpret its command-line arguments. (bestie, what did you type 😭)
• status 1 — it encountered an error during operation. it tried, okay 🥺

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• REFER — assign this variable a file name to override the default database. your database, your rules 👑

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• /usr/dict/papers/Ind — default database to be used if the REFER environment variable is not set. the classic fallback. the old reliable. the main character 💜
• file.i — index files.

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

• “Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the Unix System”, by M. E. Lesk, 1978, AT&T Bell Laboratories Computing Science Technical Report No. 69. (yes the whole title, i'm not abbreviating scholarship 💅)
• refer(1), lookbib(1), indxbib(1)

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ok that's the whole page bestie, go forth and find your references 🦋 iykyk ✨

groff 1.24.2 · 2026-10-01 — that's the version and date, love you, bye 🫶🎀